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This paper employs fictional techniques to convey the competing discourses of parenting and ‘serious’ climbing in relation to time and risk as they are experienced by heterosexual couples with at least one child and a history of commitment to traditional climbing. The resultant story is constructed from data produced by topical life-history interviews with seven white-British, middle-class couples and is interrupted, but not overlaid, by a late-modern and Foucauldian analytic thread through which we posit that the parents must negotiate a number of discourses of modernity in their pursuit of an authentic identity. The story, however, is intended more as dais for sociological dialogue, to allow the situated reader to inhabit the lifeworld and respond to its imagery. The story replicates the parents’ leisure time and space on a typical weekend and shows the contradictory and gendered nature of the discourses experienced by these climbers.

Bodycast: An Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra starring Frances McDormand, written by Suzanne Bocanegra, directed by Paul Lazar, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Fishman Space, Brooklyn, NY, December 3–7, 2013. Levees des conflits extended and Flip Book, choreographed by Boris Charmatz, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, October 25–27 and November 1–3, 2013. Night Stand, choreographed and performed by Lisa Nelson and Steve Paxton, Dia: Chelsea, New York, NY, October 10–12 and 17–19, 2013. Exit/Exist, choreographed and performed by Gregory Maqoma, Kumble Theater for the Performing Arts, Brooklyn, NY, November 1–2, 2013. Desh, directed, choreographed, and performed by Akram Khan, Rose Theater, New York, NY, November 6–7, 2013.

Souleymane Badolo is speaking to us. Mid-way through a solo he performed at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre this past June, Solo, as he is known among friends, walked to the front of the stage and addressed the audience. “Banichait!” he repeated, hands beckoning urgently for us to follow. He retreated slowly as he spoke, drawing viewers deeper into the atmosphere he had created through sound design, music, movement, and language. Clearly not the roar of the Big Apple, the urban noises of sputtering motorbikes and children playing evoked his home city of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Elongated arm gestures gave way to footwork that remained close to the ground, casual yet precise, supported by quiet, rhythmic clicking. While Badolo projects a spectrum of qualities, glibness is not one of them. Instead, he insists, almost admonishes, grounding his message in his sturdy physicality—closely cut hair, square shoulders and hips, the body of a pugilist. Still speaking, he backed up to sit on a metal chair. A flow of words in Gurunsi, his native language, ensued. We could not understand what he was saying, but strained to hear it all the same.

This paper is a confessional tale, which summarizes the author's doctoral research journey into parents who rock climb. The historical moments in qualitative research are used to frame an evolving interpretive approach, showing the relationship between theoretical and philosophical thought, and the empirical process. The paper uses personal reflections to relive the author's journey, from choosing a topic through to the representation of data. In doing this the author shows how she came across the use of ethnographic fiction, which she found to be a useful and creative approach to writing up data. The author concludes that using postmodern forms of representation in outdoor education research would provide engaging and emotive recollections of both personal and collective narratives.

This article uses a Gramscian perspective to explore the subculture of snowboarding, suggesting that cultural power is both resisted and reproduced. It examines the impact of commercialization on a snowboarding subculture from a participant perspective, gained from semi-structured interviews with boarders and skiers at a resort in British Columbia, Canada. The paper discusses new ways that snowboarders differentiate themselves from wider sporting cultures, in addition to how they do not outrightly reject the ideologies of mainstream sport but instead attempt to involve themselves more in the snowboarding industry. Through linking themselves with traditionally non-snowboarding institutions and creating alternatives to them, snowboarders become actively involved in the organization of snowboarding.