‘Clean and safe’?: Swimming ethically in compromised times and polluted places

In this article we explore emergent and enduring tensions that exist in thinking about outdoor swimming and what these can tell us about the expectations swimmers have for the possibilities in the world today and the world becoming. We will explore and describe encounters that let us see the complexities between the desire for encounters with nature, and the desire to maintain ‘clean and safe’ swimming experiences. Thinking in dialogue with Clifton Evers (2019, 2021, 2023) work on ‘polluted leisure’ and Alexis Shotwell’s (2016) concerns ‘about the evocations of purity and cleanliness’ (p.2), we are interested in how swimming spaces create barriers of access to healthy encounters by limiting the vulnerability swimmers feel in relation to various risks. Like Shotwell, we aim to challenge the privilege afforded to some groups of people to ‘perceive things how they should be, rather than how they are’ (p.7). By exploring the politics of maintaining ‘safe and clean’ swimming spaces, we aim to engage with how ‘Purity politics arise not only in our response to potential physical contamination but are also an issue for our ethical and political situation in the world’ (p.6). Maintaining purity, safety and cleanliness for ourselves and our communities of practice is an impossible task, and one that ensures we remain complicit in ongoing social and environmental injustices as well as re-producing social and cultural hierarchies related to nature, wellbeing, place, and health.