Women In The Hills will facilitate a boundary-crossing exploration of challenges to and benefits from women’s participation in upland recreation. We hope that conversations during the network will lead to the emergence of future pathways to improve the quality and quantity of female recreational use of UK uplands. These conversations will also help develop an inter-disciplinary methodology for the study of diversity in land use.
The network’s events will be structured around three key categories that have shaped women’s historical and contemporary experiences of UK uplands, and are relevant across disciplines and industries:
- women’s bodies
- women’s lives and social circumstances
- women as makers and recipients of decisions about land management.
These three categories will structure the network’s events and outputs, and provide a framework for investigating how biological sex and gendered social structures might intersect with social class, ethnicity, dis/ability and impairment, sexuality, gender identity, and religion, to shape women’s experiences and representations of land use.
The network will bring together a diverse range of participants in the following events (among others):
- three intensive one-day workshops, each investigating how the network’s key themes shape women’s recreational upland use.
- a residential field weekend for underprivileged women, to explore barriers and incentives to participation, and encourage women’s representations of their land use.
- a two-day conference in which participants share the workshops’ investigations and contribute further research findings, to generate a holistic exploration of women’s upland recreation.
To find out more about the network’s activities, and how to get involved, please visit the Network Events and Get Outdoors pages of this website.