Voices from the water(s): Developing a salutogenic trace through swimming

Abstract

Within geographies of health and wellbeing research, there is ongoing interest in how health-enabling spaces and places are assembled, maintained and reproduced through occupation and practice. Set within a specific blue space practice, swimming, this paper develops the concept of the salutogenic trace, as a new way to consider health and wellbeing in place. Trace is initially introduced as a concept that augments place and space, to consider how relational geographies are understood, using swimmers and the water they swim in, as an empirical example. In the study, swimming traces are also characterised as identifiably salutogenic, a key idea in both health promotion and recent writing on health-enabling spaces and places.

Salutogenesis sees health as a braided stream traced across the lifecourse, where ‘upstream’ health is underpinned by a sense of coherence (SOC), with three dimensions, comprehensibility, manageability and meaningfulness. A well-developed SOC in-turn prevents or reduces ill-health ‘downstream’. To better understand how the salutogenic trace works, the three core dimensions of SOC were examined from the point of view of Irish swimmers in three different types of water, river, lake and sea. Each dimension was identified and described as specific components that enabled swimmer's health and wellbeing. While these varied by swimmer and type of water, what emerged were important insights into key health enabling/promoting traces across swimmer’ lives, and how these were enacted and reproduced in blue space. In addition, other key critical components of trace, including flows, blockages and accretion, spoke to the life-course dimensions of salutogenesis.