Carving Lines through Melting Lands: A Diffractive Engagement with Troubled and Troubling Relations of Alpine Skiing in the Anthropocene

Abstract

This study conceptualizes alpine skiing as a troubled and troubling leisure practice in the context of the Anthropocene. It employs a critical feminist new materialist lens and a diffractive methodology to unravel, critique, and undo the multifaceted more-than-human relations with snow and landscapes in alpine skiing. The study contends that alpine skiing is troubled by its capitalist, extractive, and exploitative relations with nature. Diffraction disrupts these relations by cutting through dualities and boundaries. Through diffractive vignettes of contaminating, collaborating, annihilating, and speculating, the findings illustrate the tensions and entanglement at the core of alpine skiing and how they matter for more-than-human relations. The study contributes by demonstrating how a diffractive engagement with leisure can be productive of troubling, caring, and thinking-with more-than-humans in hopeful futures beyond the Anthropocene.

Keywords:

• alpine skiing
• diffraction
• feminist new materialism
• more-than-human
• relational ontology

Introduction

Alpine skiing has always been a central part of my life (as expressed in Figure 1) as for many other kids growing up in the alpine parts of West Austria. In these alpine regions, one learns to ski as a toddler and spends time in the mountains in school and with friends and family. Hence, alpine skiing is an important part of Austria’s socialization, life, and economy. With Austria’s rise as the number one winter sports destination (Wirtschaftskammer Österreich [WKO], 2021b), alpine regions have thrived by building an economy around a snowy winter wonderland in the self-proclaimed “Alpine Republic” (Müllner, 2013, p. 666).

Figure 1. Photographs of me skiing in one of my home resorts as a kid, dubbed with a popular song quote¹ and a vignette on (still) skiing in the Austrian Alps.

Recently, however, a whole industry and way of life struggled facing the multiple socioecological crises in the Anthropocene (see the poem in Figure 1). With alpine areas warming almost twice that of average global temperatures (Gobiet et al., 2014), snow security is decreasing across the Alps. Faced with ever-rising temperature, opening ski areas “in time” requires even more financial and natural resources to continue alpine skiing, such as more energy and other resources like water to create artificial snow and compensate for the lack of natural snow (Steiger et al., 2022; Steiger & Scott, 2020). At the same time, through artificial snowmaking, skiing as a leisure practice can increase pollution through CO₂ emissions, dust, waste, and sewage (Steiger & Scott, 2020).

The struggle that alpine skiing faces extends beyond weather conditions. As Pitas and Young (2023) emphasized, the multiple crises of the Anthropocene call into question the moral justification for doing leisure, particularly with leisure practices—such as alpine skiing—requiring an excess of financial and natural resources in times when many others worldwide struggle with a lack of the same. While public criticism toward the skiing industry and concerns about the preservation of alpine environment have increased (see, e.g. Stoddart, 2011; or Wegerer & Nadegger, 2023), the underlying paradigms of alpine skiing as a leisure activity and its relations to alpine landscapes have remained largely unquestioned (Pitas & Young, 2023).

Alpine skiing, for example, commodifies natural habitats for human pleasure and experiences while utilizing limited resources for travel and leisure. These practices are frequently carried out without regard for the impacts on ecosystems, animals, and many other more-than-humans. Alpine skiing is dependent on, and even thrives on, commodification (Gross & Winiwarter, 2015; Stoddart, 2008, 2011; Tsing, 2015) and privatization (Rose & Carr, 2018) of alpine landscapes. In all these practices, alpine skiing reduces more-than-humans like snow and landscapes to “passive, acted upon by humans” (Brice & Thorpe, 2021, p. 2) actors and limits their existence to “an inert, unproblematic backdrop” (Rose & Carr, 2018, p. 265) for leisure activities. However, as the snow melts away, so do Austria’s economic opportunities and social practices as a skiing nation and holiday destination. The taken-for-granted relations in doing leisure in the alps get shaken up: alpine skiing is in trouble.

Alpine skiing is both driving and confronted with the trouble—the impact, consequences, and discussions—of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is a geological era in-becoming through mankind (Crutzen, 2002): human activities and emissions artificially prolong and intensify the warm, interglacial period. However, situating the anthropos in the Anthropocene, mankind here needs to be read more distinctively: not as humanity as homogenous whole, but as a peculiar social system of forces, such as “capitalism as a system of power, profit, and re/production” (Moore, 2017, p. 606; see also Haraway (2015, 2016) on “Capitalocene”). Modern tourism and leisure businesses are built upon capitalist accumulation through experiencing (the end of) an autonomous nature in the Anthropocene (Fletcher, 2019). Capitalism as the dominant economic mode of doing business (Ergene et al., 2018) and the resulting excessive use of fossil fuel and limited natural resources “unleashed a metabolic rift” (Wright et al., 2018, p. 459). This rift situates the human in the social and nature together with other lives at the margins, such as women, people of color, and indigenous people as external entities to be acted upon (Moore, 2017). This distinction threatens the more-than-human relations that sustained tourism, leisure, and, more broadly, life on Earth. Simultaneously, the Anthropocene (and its entangled concepts like the Capitalocene) is seen as a critical tool to problematize and reveal new relations between mankind and Earth (Haraway, 2016; Valtonen et al., 2020a; Wright et al., 2018), also in tourism and leisure (see, e.g. Fletcher, 2019). Therefore, the Anthropocene prompts and necessitates “thinking the becomings of earth and society together” and to “probe the richly layered formations we have inherited for the overlooked, marginalized or as yet unactualized geosocial possibilities murmuring within them” (Clark & Yusoff, 2017, p. 6). Alpine skiing is thus becoming-with skiers and the skiing industry, the geology of alpine landscapes, snow, and the trouble they all face in the Anthropocene. How can I continue to ski as “the immediacies of the Anthropocene become more pressing” (Rose & Carr, 2018, p. 266)?

In this study, I argue that doing leisure in the Anthropocene requires “staying with [this] trouble” (Haraway, 2016) in doing leisure: acknowledging the trouble (the commodification, exploitation, and pollution) and exploring the potential for troubling (re-thinking, probing, and speculating) this mess in leisure practices by integrating feminist new materialist perspectives (in particular Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2016; Tsing, 2015). Therefore, the main research question is: How can alpine skiing as a troubled and troubling leisure practice open new perspectives in doing leisure with more-than-humans in the Anthropocene? Empirically, this study explores troubled and troubling more-than-human relations of leisure through a diffractive reading of personal memories, ethnographic fieldwork, and media resources of alpine skiing in the Alps. I diffract the more-than-human becoming-with alpine skiing in the Anthropocene. This study contributes to emerging questions on how to live with and do leisure in the Anthropocene through a situated, relational understanding of alpine skiing in and with nature.

Alpine skiing: a troubled leisure practice in a melting world

The trouble with(in) alpine skiing is rooted along multiple lines of class, gender, and commodification in the Austrian context and in the Alps more broadly.

Although alpine skiing was reserved for the elite class before and at the beginning of the twentieth century, it quickly became increasingly popular in the “postwar tourism history as a success story based on the pioneering spirit, adventurousness and a zest for action” (Groß, 2017, p. 126) in Austria and internationally (Podkalicka & Strobl, 2019). Between and after both World Wars, Alpine skiing provided an escape for the local population into the “idyllic” nature (Praher, 2021). The masculine, white, abled bodies of ski icons like Franz Klammer told heroic tales of conquering the Alps’ perceived pristine wilderness. They attempted to leave the working class and their life in the remote and often impoverished valleys behind by disciplining their bodies with steep ascents and dangerous descents in harsh weather and alpine terrain (Jensen & Gyimóthy, 2021; Müllner, 2013; Praher, 2021). After World War II, the massification of alpine skiing accelerated with technological improvement and expansion of the infrastructure. These developments made skiing more efficient (Groß, 2017; Praher, 2021), served to control and dominate the “wild” alpine terrain (Gross & Winiwarter, 2015), and offered new economic opportunities for remote alpine valleys (Groß, 2017). Until today, extensive infrastructure has allowed skiers to easily explore high-alpine landscapes with little terrain knowledge and physical effort. In Austria alone, 2,920 ski lifts provide access to the mountains for 511 million people during the winter season (Wirtschaftskammer Österreich [WKO], 2021a). Alpine skiing became a mass phenomenon for experiencing and consuming alpine landscapes.

However, the critical literature on leisure and tourism (Evers, 2019; Fletcher, 2019; Rantala et al., 2020; Valtonen et al., 2020a) increasingly questions leisure practices like alpine skiing and their potential as “benign and authentic ways to experience remote and rugged wilderness” (Grimwood, 2011, p. 51). Alpine skiing is based on narratives of control and discipline over snow and mountains as less-than-human bodies (Groß, 2017; Praher, 2021) and their commodification in “cheap nature” (Moore, 2017, p. 595) or even the end of nature (Fletcher, 2019). Skiing implies taking a “mastery ‘over’ others (nature, the body, death, other bodies…)” (Fullagar & Pavlidis, 2021, p. 155): to withstand cold temperatures, discipline the body with cutting-edge technology and physical exercise, and conquer the highest peaks for economic growth through resort expansion. Thus, alpine skiing neglects the agency, limits, and inherent value of more-than-human others, such as snow, mountains, wildlife, or the Alps beyond an economic resource. Instead, alpine skiing is actively reproducing modern tourism’s economic and societal troubles in the Anthropocene (Fletcher, 2019; Praher, 2021). Hence, alpine skiing is not the detached, unpolitical escape in pristine, passive nature that romanticized winter wonderland narratives may suggest.

Against this backdrop, I define alpine skiing as a troubled leisure practice relative to more-than-humans. However, although leisure practices like alpine skiing perpetuate troubled leisure ideals, they can also trouble the very same. Ren (2021) suggests that “the trouble is not ‘over’ […] but rather a condition that we are in and in which we all become-with” (p. 135). To become-with alpine skiing, we must shift our focus from troubled leisure practices to the potential for troubling nature-culture dichotomies through leisure. The quest now is to find a possibility to do so. As Höckert’s (2020) more-than-human engagement with childhood fairy tales emphasizes: “So where to begin after finding out that perhaps we are not cast as the nice pigs, but as the wolves who blow homes down and mess things up?” (p. 63)

Feminist new materialism: the troubling potential of skiing in alpine ruins

In troubled leisure practices of the Anthropocene, nature or landscapes are situated in distinct realms and conceived as distinct and stable entities (e.g. wilderness and civilization, humans and snow, or leisure and the environment) that mix (Grimwood, 2011), but do not intra-act² (Barad, 2007). By maintaining this ontological distinction, anthropocentric narratives of capital, mastery, dominance, or control face no challenges, at least not ontological ones (Moore, 2017). To unleash the troubling potential of leisure practices in the Anthropocene, the engagement with more-than-human relations necessitates onto-epistemological alternatives (Barad, 2007) rather than (leisure) business as usual (Ergene et al., 2018). These alternatives must expose and decenter the troublesome human-nature separation and its perpetuation in capitalist accumulation, while also opening up new more-than-human relations in doing leisure in the Anthropocene. Critical feminist new materialist perspectives (here in particular Haraway, 2016, and Tsing, 2015) and related work in tourism and leisure research (e.g. Evers, 2019; Ren, 2021; Valtonen et al., 2020b) research offers such a potential for thinking-with and undoing troubled leisure.

Drawing on Haraway (2016), a relational understanding of more-than-human relations in leisure practices acknowledges both that the troubles of the Anthropocene were “relationally made” (p. 50), but also how they can “be relationally unmade in order to compose […] something more livable” (p. 50). From a relational perspective, leisure practices like alpine skiing are troubled by their capitalist, polluting, and exploitative relations. Simultaneously, they have the potential for troubling these one-dimensional relations through “practices of relationally engaging with nonhuman nature” (Rose & Carr, 2018, p. 273).

In the field of tourism and leisure, the troubling potential of such a feminist new materialist perspective and relational engagement with leisure practices has recently been explored. For example, Evers (2019) and Olive (2022) show how surfing and swimming permeate human and other (water) bodies by developing sensitivities for pollution and nonhuman animals, and thus blur boundaries between humans, animals, particles, landscapes, weather, and nature. They show how we float and breathe with the waves, but also with the pollution in our oceans, how we become prey while also advocating for dangerous animals such as sharks through leisure practices (Evers, 2019; Olive, 2022). Valtonen et al. (2020b) narrated how we live and travel with unwanted more-than-human companions such as mosquitoes, making us aware of our bodies’ trans-corporeality (Alaimo, 2010). In doing leisure, these troubling encounters allow us to “feel the illusion of human/nature separation” (Olive, 2022, p. 3). Thus, a feminist new materialist understanding of leisure practices brings us closer to the middle of more-than-human matter. It shows how these encounters “help us think, to enable us to connect” (Valtonen & Pullen, 2021, p. 509) and trouble rigid dichotomies and ideals in leisure (Rantala & Varley, 2019).

Centering more-than-human relations in leisure practices through a feminist new materialist perspective urges us to account for the political, ethical, and world-making consequences of becoming-with “more-than-human worlds: pollution, capitalism, and environmental crises” (Brice & Thorpe, 2021, p. 6). In troubled leisure, this becoming is no longer limited to the “pristine,” “pure,” and “wild” nature, but becomes amidst capitalist ruins (Tsing, 2015). Researching with (rather than on) matsutake mushrooms, Tsing (2015) follows multiple political, geosocial, and gendered histories and their lively consequences that unfold through the entanglements of fungi–human lives in disturbed forests. In the area of leisure studies, scholars have also dissected these relations. For example, returning to surfing with pollution, polluting productive industrial zones in and through leisure “ironically has the potential to trouble capital” (Evers, 2019, p. 431) and “resist dominant (and often oppressive) social structures and configurations” (Rose & Carr, 2018, p. 268). Nadegger (2023) emphasized the more-than-human relations in waiting-for, connecting-to, and thriving-with snow that allow for alternative business models and give voice to the more-than-human (Höckert et al., 2022) on the fringes of the profit-oriented winter tourism industry. These entanglements make us aware of troubled (polluting, exploiting, dominating) leisure practices and allow for troubling (dissecting, probing, knitting, undoing) these hegemonic relations to more-than-human others to discover “new ways of life” (Stalker, 2019, p. 348) in the Anthropocene.

Becoming-with(in) alpine skiing through such a relational, more-than-human understanding of leisure in capitalist ruins opens up the possibility of interrogating and returning to the damage done in ski areas’ capitalist ruins (Haraway, 2016; Tsing, 2015). In alpine skiing, I breathe the frosty winter air and marvel at the dancing reflection of sunbeams on snow crystals while freezing my toes in tight ski boots, getting lost in snowy and foggy white-outs, and encountering avalanches. Alpine skiing invites us to dwell in the vast views above alpine peaks while simultaneously clustering and modifying them with ski lifts. Although these encounters can feel frightening, calming, disturbing, and much more, they all have the possibility to redirect our attention to the relations with more-than-human others.

Dissecting alpine skiing as leisure practice and its more than human entanglements as both troubled and troubling from a feminist new materialist perspective is the starting point “to anchor explanations in becoming and difference” (Stalker, 2019, p. 350). What are the consequences and possibilities of encounters amidst more-than-human bodies, ski lifts, and alpine landscapes, the skier and snow? Building on these lines, I return to the research question once more: How can alpine skiing as a troubled and troubling leisure practice open new perspectives in doing leisure with more than humans in the Anthropocene? This question is empirically explored through a diffractive engagement of personal memories, ethnographic observations in ski areas, and secondary media articles to trouble—undo and return to—the troubled tensions, ideals, and oppressions in alpine skiing and speculate about alternative ways to ski with more-than-human others.

Methods

Cutting together-apart: a diffractive engagement with alpine skiing

Walking by the ocean in Santa Cruz, I re-turn again and again to thoughts of diffraction and entanglement. The conversation is ongoing. The redwoods, the ocean, the paths taken and those which may yet have been taken hold the memory of these explorations by foot and by mind. We are being churned by the soil, the wind, the foggy mist. A multiplicity, an infinity in its specificity, condensed into here-now. Each grain of sand, each bit of soil is diffracted/entangled across spacetime. Responding – being responsible/response-able – to the thick tangles of spacetimematterings that are threaded through us, the places and times from which we came but never arrived and never leave is perhaps what re-turning is about. (Barad, 2014, p. 184)

In her quote, Barad (2014) touched upon diffraction as a responsible and response-able engagement within more-than-human entanglements. These deep intra-actions set the stage for the empirical part of this paper, which will use a diffractive methodology with snow in alpine skiing. In contrast to a reflexive paradigm that mirrors reality, Haraway (1997/2018, p. 16) first established diffraction as an alternative feminist perspective on knowledge production: “[R]eflexivity, like reflection, only displaces the same elsewhere, setting up the worries about copy and original and the search for the authentic and really real. […] Diffraction is the optical metaphor for making a difference in the world.” Using the notion of diffraction by Haraway (1997/2018), Barad (2014) further developed the metaphor of diffraction into an apparatus of knowledge production. By diffracting in and through research, we “cut together-apart” and “(re)configure spactetimemattering” (Barad, 2014, p. 168). Diffraction allows us to question, reassemble, and fragment dualities, assemblages, and relations and to produce new “lines of flight” (Fox & Alldred, 2015, p. 402) in seemingly stable or given realities. For example, Kuismin (2022) demonstrated how a diffractive intra-action with organizational space forces us to focus on different things: how a nightclub atmosphere and lights can shift from joyful to restrictive through overlapping encounters with bodies, materiality, light, and smell, as well as the researcher. Diffraction is inherently more than pulling apart dualities with their assigned elements and inter-actions in hegemonic or dominant structures. It is an affirmative, attentive, careful, and response-able becoming with(in) the entanglement of theories, positions, and encounters read through each other, as well as the consequences these intra-actions produce (Barad, 2007; Brice & Thorpe, 2021; Kuismin, 2022; Wickström et al., 2023).

A diffractive methodology can account for a profoundly relational and interwoven understanding of how we come into being through relations to (more-than-human) others and challenge and (re)configure leisure amidst and beyond anthropocentric dualisms. We can cut from and through texts, encounters, and images, as well as our relations with more-than-human others. We then touch and read these materials and the researchers’ experiences through one another to uncover points of difference, alterity, and trouble (Kuismin, 2022; Wickström et al., 2023). Diffraction opens spaces of alterity and difference and draws attention to more-than-human power relations (Jenkins et al., 2021; Wickström et al., 2023). This receptivity makes it particularly apt for curious (Valtonen & Salmela, 2023), sensitive (Zajchowski & Rose, 2020), embodied (Valtonen et al., 2020b; Valtonen & Pullen, 2021), and reactive (Stalker, 2019) engagements of alpine skiing with more-than-humans like snow, mountains, or landscapes.

With a diffractive perspective on leisure, there is no way of “studying these entanglements without getting caught up in them” (Barad, 2007, p. 74). The researcher is thus not outside or inside the phenomenon but is becoming the diffraction pattern: I—the researcher—interfere, entangle, touch, and affect others as much as others move, touch, and affect me. By following the threads and rebuilding worlds through cuts and intra-actions—with words, images, the senses, memories, more-than-human bodies, and feelings (Brummans et al., 2022; Kuismin, 2022)—a diffractive reading of alpine skiing allows for troubling leisure activities together with and among more-than-humans, rather than merely carving the same lines through alpine landscapes.

Encountering and diffracting data

The empirical material in this study consists of multiple intimate and personal encounters with alpine skiing. I gathered these materials through empirical fieldwork, media consumption, and through traces of personal memories of growing up in the alps. Table 1 shows a detailed overview. In these snippets, the leisure practices of alpine skiing are encountered as a researcher, a consumer, a worker, a skier, a kid, an Austrian citizen, and a daughter. Furthermore, the sensations and feelings of being with the mountains, touching snow, and sensing the frosty winter air realize a “felt phenomenology” (Zajchowski & Rose, 2020, p. 7) in these entanglements. My memories and engagement with snow, skiing and the alps through poems, ethnographic fieldwork in ski areas, and secondary sources (e.g. newspaper articles and videos) serve as a basis to diffract—to “cut together-apart” (Barad, 2014, p. 168)—hurtful, troubling, potentially beautiful practices of doing leisure in snowy landscapes.

Table 1. Data snippets for diffractive engagement.

Data source	Data type	Analytical purpose
Ethnographic observations in the ski area in Obergurgl (Austria)^3	198 photos, 29 videos, transcribed voice memos, and field notes (in total 42 pages)	Understanding the economic relations and power dynamics within the alpine skiing industry
Personal memories of alpine skiing	30 photos, several poems on touching snow (4 pages total), informal conversations with family members;	Reflections on the own touchpoint and own gaze on alpine skiing and snow through the last 30 years
Secondary sources	9 newspaper articles (Addendum, 2018, 2019; APA, 2022; Panny, 2020; Prantl, 2016; Welz, 2021; Wirnsberger, 2021; Wohlgemuth, 2022; Vogt, 2022; - in total 46 pages), 2 documentaries (Patagonia, 2021; Planet e, 2021; - in total 48 min);	Centering the analysis in the broader discourse on alpine skiing with its tensions and opportunities

For the diffractive engagement, I organized the collected materials using the data analysis software MaxQDA. This step made it easier to read the individual pieces all at once and through each other (Jenkins et al., 2021; Lenz Taguchi & Palmer, 2013). I first wrote notes and memos and added some tags to understand how the data pieces collide and relate to each other and what these relations perform, remind, evoke, and neglect (Lenz Taguchi & Palmer, 2013). In particular, this step is not about producing fixed codes or categories about a particular outside world. Instead, it serves to discover worldly configurations and differences (Barad, 2014; Kuismin, 2022) with which “researchers, as agents of observation, become entangled” (Jenkins et al., 2021, p. 984). In the next step, I sculpted these relations into multi-modal vignettes. In this process, the materials themselves were literally cut-apart and put back together—pieces of pictures and photographs overlapped with quotes, poems, and concerns in the Anthropocene. My childhood memories and recollections of skiing captured in photos, oral stories, and poems, echoed by more recent observations and media. To operationalize these diffractive patterns and create a “thick and affective materiality” (Fox & Alldred, 2015, p. 407), I used photo editing software and artificial intelligence image editing programs (such as Art Breeder) to synthesize, bend, and combine the visual, textual, and felt experiences into four vignettes. Quotes from the text were used as prompts to read the images through each other using AI image editing programs. These diffracted visuals then seeped back into the poems and writings. Thus, the vignettes are “synthetic texts encapsulating complex and immanent relationships of meaning, action, and intra-corporeal transformation” (Jenkins et al., 2021, p. 984). Contaminating, collaborating, annihilating, and speculating present the researcher’s—my—agential cuts of alpine skiing. The following sections invite you into my more-than-human becoming of alpine skiing with its troubled and troubling potential in the Anthropocene.

Findings

Vignette 1: contaminating

Contaminating (see Figure 2) by, with and through alpine skiing echoes through clashing notions of polluting and touching, cold metal pipes and warm human bodies, freezing, and melting. Alpine skiing is accumulating wealth by contaminating mountains with proliferating metal-fiberglass-machine-human webs (as depicted in Figure 2): skier after skier carving through the alpine landscapes, going to another slope, getting up another lift, ever faster; a maze of water pipes fueling snow cannons all over the ski area, vast webs of fiberglass spanning to keep the mountain as an industrial, not an alpine, landscape. While these networks are not hidden, seeing the server rooms, listening to the humming motors, touching the cold metal, and following their metastasis throughout a ski area revealed what contamination can feel and look like in my ethnographic observations.

Figure 2. Contaminating – diffractive vignette on alpine skiing. ¹: Patagonia (2021, 00:00:34); ^2: Ethnographic field notes - Nov 13^th, 2021; ³Addendum (2019); ⁴Prantl (2016).

These contaminating encounters diffract various aspects of the powerful alienation from more-than-human entanglements in the Anthropocene through capital production (Haraway, 2016; Moore, 2017): transforming the mountain into a snow factory, the skiers and myself in a smoothly running machine, producing while destroying snowflakes, using and polluting water-snow-bodies. My skier body did not end with my skis, but extended through pipes, sewage, and snow cannons. Only through contamination can alpine skiing, as it has existed for the last two decades, endure in a warming climate. Holding on to alpine skiing despite the slowly surfacing trouble amid these pipes and cables; we inhabit the ski area but act upon alpine landscapes. We continue alpine skiing by contaminating alpine landscapes with pipes, wires, skier-bodies: a contamination by “salvage accumulation” (Tsing, 2015) that “no longer promise progress but can and does extend devastation and make precarity the name of our systematicity” (Haraway, 2016, p. 37).

The easiest way to detach from this grim reality of contaminating alpine areas through commodification would be to stop skiing altogether and leave the trouble rather than stay with it (Haraway, 2016), but leaving is impossible as contamination works both ways. Tsing (2015, p. 27) reminds us how “we are contaminated by our encounters; they change who we are as we make way for others.” These encounters with the snow, pipes, and terrain creep back into my skiing body and mind. The snow, the mountains, and skiing have grabbed me. My skiing body is not self-contained, but alpine skiing is becoming in contaminating encounters within the snow-human, alpine-industrial, touching-violating trans-corporeality of bodies (Alaimo, 2010). Not only metaphorically, but quite literally. For example, the bacteria and fungi that thrive in the artificial water reservoirs and their connected system of pipes, creep back into my-our water bodies. Although this contamination is “complicated, often ugly, and humbling” (Tsing, 2015, p. 33), it also means that I cannot just let go. Leaving is impossible. I return with every turn on white, crispy slopes as I “muddle along” (Evers, 2019, p. 434) with the pipes, snow cannons, metal edges, and pollution notwithstanding, the beauty of breathing cold winter air, hearing the wind soar over the gentle peaks, and squeezing my feet into tight and stiff ski boots while fretting about the rising temperatures. Collaborations can emerge from these returns while still bearing the scars of the past, such as trenches for more pipes and fiberglass.

Vignette 2: collaborating

Although alpine skiing can be exploitative, polluting, and invasive, within these contaminating encounters, new alliances emerge: a deep kinship between human–snow bodies, synchronization with the seasons, and a home within high-risk terrain. The vignette in Figure 3 expresses becoming with alpine skiing as a more-than-human endeavor: a sense of temporal and spatial orientation in the entangled personal histories and ski slopes flowing through the Alps, a mutual sense of responding to sensations and being responsible for the entanglement of alpine terrain and human life trajectories. As I leave my tracks in snowy landscapes and board the next lift, I am (and in the midst of) the Anthropocene, contaminating with each carving turn. However, in these turns, a shared sense of survival emerges with snow and alpine landscapes. These endeavors are only possible as both/and rather than as either/or. They are the agential cuts where contamination and collaboration mingle.

Figure 3. Collaborating. ¹: Patagonia (2021, 00:05:34).

In alpine skiing, contaminating (Figure 2) and collaborating (Figure 3) go together. While contamination transforms “through encounters,” collaboration entails “working across difference” (Tsing, 2015, pp. 28–29) and looking for the reconfiguration of worlds within these entanglements. In the decision to care (rather than dominate) and dwell (rather than consume), collaboration through alpine skiing allows opportunities to be attentive to specific worldings that normally remain at the margins (Haraway, 2016; Tsing, 2015): developing an increased awareness to the shifting seasons and how to live and work with them, or finding a critical voice despite the underpinnings of an ever-growing industry (see, e.g. Wegerer & Nadegger, 2023).

Contaminating and collaborating is a returning of hopes, affection, and the possibilities and turning over of assumptions, dichotomies, and troubles (Barad, 2014; Fullagar & Pavlidis, 2021). It nurtures new forms of response-ability (Grimwood, 2015; Haraway, 2016; Jenkins et al., 2021) that extend the capacity for “living and dying in worlds” (Jenkins et al., 2021, p. 981). In these borderlands between contaminating and collaborating, alpine skiing as a leisure practice has the potential for “interesting traffic and powerful hopes” (Haraway, 1997/2018, p. 149): it brings together human–snow–bodies, confronts the effects of pollution in their entanglement, while opening possibilities for collaborating in shared trajectories between lifelines and alpine terrain. Nonetheless, exploring the diffractive patterns of pollution and care, exploitation, and exploration in the two vignettes above provides no concrete answers: Should I leave alpine skiing behind in the Anthropocene? Can I even leave it behind? While assembling these relations across skiing and snowing bodies, metal pipes, and melting waterways, I realize with grief how “not all collaborations are harmonic” (Stalker, 2019, p. 353).

Vignette 3: annihilating

The confrontation between my skiing and snow-bodies, the future of skiing and the Anthropocene, is often violent and devastating—or even annihilating (Figure 4), as in “the state or fact of being completely destroyed or obliterated” (Merriam Webster, n.d.). Avalanches and alpine terrain destabilization due to declining permafrost surface the fragility of capitalist accumulation and acting on nature. Individual choices and agency of skiers or business operators are decentered. Skiers become entangled in the melting and crumbling snow masses of avalanches, and entire villages, such as Galtür, vanish. At the same time, a lack of snow and cold temperatures demolish Austria’s success as a skiing nation (Müllner, 2013). Annihilating encounters disintegrate alpine skiing practices and routines that have followed and perpetuated a capitalist and commodified understanding of alpine environments. These more-than-human collisions annihilate the illusion of passivity and control over other bodies (Iossifidis & Garforth, 2022). As the snow and winter landscapes melt away, destroy infrastructure or simply never appear, they similarly draw our attention to the illusion of human–nature separation. In alpine skiing, we feel that “being interconnected with nature is not a choice, nor is it inherently nice” (Verlie, 2021, p.7).

Figure 4. Annihilating. ¹: Ethnographic field notes – November 14, 2021; ²: Wirnsberger (2021).

In a diffractive reading of alpine skiing as troubled and troubling leisure practice, annihilating more-than-human and human bodies’ sparks fear and disorientation (Prendergast, 2017) at different levels. First, it reveals the precarity of toxic, decomposing, or rather melting, intra-actions (Alaimo, 2010; Stalker, 2019): numb fingers and toes as they gradually transition into snow-bodies with no clear boundaries, as well as crumbling peaks and vast landslides that transform landscapes not through individual, entrepreneurial choice, but through their entanglement with a globally destabilizing climate. Second, it diminishes the skier’s and the ski industry’s unique position as the only active actors in alpine skiing, revealing a realm where more-than-humans are “undoubtedly and uncontrollably alive” (Kortekallio, 2019, pp. 62–63).

While these violent entanglements may highlight the contradictions within alpine skiing as a leisure activity in the Anthropocene due to their dramatic scope, Iossifidis and Garforth (2022) argue that annihilating is unsettling and violent, but necessary to develop collective emotional work in living with climate change and staying with more-than-human trouble (Haraway, 2016). In that sense, I propose, annihilating can only offer possibilities to think-with more-than-human relations in its physics definition as “the combination of a particle and its antiparticle that results in the subsequent total conversion of the particles into energy” (Merriam Webster, n.d.). The hurtful, violent, and challenging more-than-human entanglements open new questions (as seen in the last part of the poem in Figure 4). Diffractive engagement with alpine skiing as leisure can precisely do this: setting free energy for speculating about the uncanny things yet to come while we face disruptions.

Vignette 4: speculating

The future is uncertain and indeterminate in alpine skiing—it is speculative. There is no guarantee for snowy peaks and no emergency cure for lack of snow. Moreover, while this uncertainty and indeterminacy would require imagining new, different ways of alpine skiing amid the trouble, alpine skiing does not deal well with speculating (see Figure 5). Alpine skiing clings to the technological adaptations, e.g. through snow cannons to maintain the seasonal schedules as they always were. We stay detached in the high-alpine fortresses, looking through the gondola window at stripes of artificial snow and remaining glacier patches, a future that consists of past relations. To avoid further trouble, alpine skiing strives for precise cuts, predictable ends, or straightforward solutions. The industry’s technological progress through artificial snowmaking recreates future solutions made of pasts: the same masculine and human heroes, commodified rhythms, and resource-based relations. Alpine skiing is optimistic that technology and investments will fix it, but remains hopeless in these endeavors. Verlie (2019) defines such optimism as “a sense of certainty that things will be okay” while also “believing that someone else [such as technological improvement] will look after it” (p. 757). However, this optimism cannot account for the more-than-human entanglements in becoming with alpine skiing: the grief and anxiety in waiting for the first snowfall, the mourning of the long-gone abundant powder snow every January, and the fragility of doing leisure in capitalist ruins.

Figure 5. Speculating. ¹: Ethnographic field notes – November 14^th, 21; ²: Patagonia (2021, 00:01:27); ³: Vogt (2022).

Figure 6. Re-turning. Diffractions of me skiing today and as a kid with a poem about how skiing still matters to me.

To be hopeful in alpine skiing, we require a speculative engagement with the future, one that allows for grief, mourning, and hopeful stories and acknowledges more-than-human relations of more kinds (Haraway, 2016). The diffractive vignette on speculating shows how new more-than-human murmurs (Fullagar & Pavlidis, 2021) of alpine skiing on melting mountains by filmmakers, media, ski area workers, and skiers thread through each other. It is about developing new literacy (Evers, 2019) on alpine skiing, even if it comes from melting mountains: new ways of alpine skiing in collective memories, in irregular and indeterminate seasons rather than pre-planned seasonal openings, in returning to the entanglements with snow, alpine landscapes and winter through speculative storytelling. A speculative engagement with alpine skiing allows us to stay with our responsibility and response-ability, test and fail, and, most importantly, persevere our troubling in the troubled entanglements with the more-than-human (Höckert, 2020; Verlie, 2019). After all, these “speculations will lead us […] to something new” (Tsing, 2015, p. 228).

Discussion and conclusion

This study discussed alpine skiing in its troubled and troubling relations with more-than-humans from a feminist new materialist perspective and a diffractive engagement. Thinking through contaminating, collaborating, annihilating, and speculating reveals new futures on how to stay-with alpine skiing amidst the dominant relations embedded in their historical, economic, and social roots (Groß, 2017; Praher, 2021). This study revealed both loving and hurtful encounters in alpine skiing by diffracting the multiple entanglements, histories, and tensions in capitalism, domination, and human–nature separation. Contaminating the alpine terrain goes together with troubling through collaborative survival in more-than-human relations in alpine skiing. Moreover, annihilating and speculating grapple with indeterminate futures with little hope but abundant possibilities to become-with snow, mountains, and landscapes. Building on these examples, I propose the following implications for troubling the troubled relations with more-than-humans in the Anthropocene: a theoretical turning-over of the more-than-human in leisure through feminist new materialism, a methodological turning-to the transformative potential of diffraction, and, finally, a re-turning to leisure differently.

Turning-over the more-than-human in leisure through feminist new materialism

Facing the trouble of the Anthropocene, radical engagement with leisure and its underlying paradigms is inevitable—ecologically and morally (see, e.g. Fletcher, 2019; or Pitas & Young, 2023). Through feminist new materialism, this study contributes to the ongoing dilemma of doing leisure in the Anthropocene, particularly its engagement with relational ontologies and their implications for staying with the trouble in capitalist ruins (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2016; Tsing, 2015). By situating alpine skiing as becoming-with more-than-human relations, I show the impossibility to engage with leisure with the ontological separation of human activity and more-than-human nature. Grounded in a relational ontology, the vignettes on contaminating, collaborating, annihilating, and speculating emphasize a relational quest for collaborative survival (Tsing, 2015), but also how these entanglements make it impossible to simply leave. I stay with the more-than-human relations in alpine skiing as they surface through annihilating and contaminating intra-actions with avalanches, pollution, metal pipes, and fiberglass in the Anthropocene. I stay with more-than-human affirmation, care, and collaboration in attuning and speculating about alternative becomings in alpine skiing. In all these relations, we remain with the trouble of doing leisure (Haraway, 2016; Ren, 2021). Building on relational, feminist, new materialist ontologies, this study thus contributes to critical research that questions the unpolitical and detached paradigms of alpine skiing—and leisure, more general - as something that can continue by acting upon an outside nature (Fletcher, 2019; Grimwood, 2011; Rantala et al., 2020; Valtonen et al., 2020a). The vignettes lay bare the illusion of human-nature dualism in the Anthropocene. Thus, this study argues that becoming-with leisure in the Anthropocene requires onto-epistemological alternatives that trouble the troubled relations and engage with them in ways that allow for difference to emerge (see also Stalker, 2019). Feminist new materialism is one of these alternatives, which enables us to think with, theorize, and cultivate ways of noticing, attuning, grieving, and speculating in doing leisure differently.

Turning-to the transformative potential of diffraction

Feminist new materialist theories in tourism research (Brice & Thorpe, 2021; Fullagar & Pavlidis, 2021; Valtonen et al., 2020b) combined with diffractive approaches (Barad, 2014; Jenkins et al., 2021; Kuismin, 2022) provide the tools to experiment with different agential cuts in leisure practices and undo leisure within the difference that emerges from them. A methodological engagement with leisure practices and their more than human relations through diffraction allows us to explore tensions, questions, and potentials that arise in the diffraction through these vignettes. Contaminating, collaborating, annihilating, and speculating draw attention to difference, to troubled and troubling relations: they “complicate, tease out nuances, speculate and hesitate, escaping closed ends” (Höckert, 2020, p. 66). Therefore, I highlight the transformative potential of diffractive methodologies and vignettes (Barad, 2014; Kuismin, 2022; Wickström et al., 2023). Diffraction confronts us with our responsibility, emerging not as a value or obligation, but through the indeterminate alterity “that lives in, around, and through us” (Barad, 2012, p. 218). It can help us to register “forms of exchange not aimed at capital accumulation” and help us “fully internalize the environmental and social costs of production in a manner that does not promote commodification” (Fletcher, 2019, p. 532). By turning-to the difference and multiplicity of relations in alpine skiing, the vignettes expose the mess, grief, exploitation, and domination, as well as the affirmation, hope, and care within these relations. A diffractive engagement invites leisure researchers and practitioners to ponder these encounters. Which relations matter to us, to our leisure practices? How can we pay attention to them? How do these more-than-human entanglements change what matters? In this open-endedness, we see the potential for speculative, hopeful stories about possible futures in doing leisure—although they may be entirely different (Höckert, 2020; Verlie, 2019).

Re-turning to leisure

I create (and continue to be in) trouble while skiing. However, a diffractive engagement with leisure explores differences in doing leisure—in our skier-snow, surfer-canoeists-water, traveler-mosquito-bodily entanglements (Evers, 2019; Grimwood, 2011; Olive, 2022; Valtonen et al., 2020b)—and what these differences bring to the fore. Neither continuing skiing-as-usual nor turning our backs will stop this trouble. Re-turning to leisure through a feminist new materialist and diffractive engagement turnover the trouble and dichotomies andto the potential of caring, attentive, and frequently disturbing more-than-human relations. We cultivate knowledge and sharpen our senses of response-ability and responsibility by re-turning (Barad, 2012, 2014; Grimwood, 2015). Re-turning bridges the liminal space between turning away in fear and simply repeating the troubled leisure proposed in alpine skiing and other leisure practices in the Anthropocene’s blind optimism of salvations. We can develop new literacies and sensibilities to stay-with and live-with the trouble and cultivate more-than-human futures from and beyond capitalist ruins by re-turning to leisure practices such as alpine skiing through diffraction with its contaminated, collaborative, annihilating, and speculative possibilities (Haraway, 2016; Ren, 2021; Tsing, 2015; Verlie, 2019).

With this, I re-turn to alpine skiing once more (see Figure 6).

Acknowledgments

I want to thank the SI editors and the reviewers for their attentive and supportive feedback and encouragement throughout the review process. Further, I am grateful for the inspiring comments at the GWO 2023 Stream 21 “Vibrant matter for un-doing marginalization”. The bold, creative, and engaged conversations have made the diffractive work in this piece even more of an adventure.

Disclosure statement

The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.

Additional information

Funding

The fieldwork for the empirical data collection was supported by the “Tourismusforschungszentrum Tirol” under the “Geschäftsmodell Wintersport” project.

Notes

1 This quote is from the song “Skifoahn” [eng. “Skiing”], a popular winter sport anthem by the Austrian artist Wolfgang Ambros. The English translation of the quote is “Skiing is the most fantastic thing you can imagine.” In this song, the artist describes his love and drive to go skiing in the Austrian Alps.

2 Barad (2007) proposed the term intra-action to draw attention to “the mutual constitution of entangled agencies”(p. 33). In line with a relational ontology, distinct entities (e.g., skier and snow) emerge through agential cuts in their entanglement, rather than preceding it as individual, absolute entities that exist independent from each other.

3 These observations were part of a larger project on the business model of alpine skiing, focussing on the work practices in and with snow. Further insights about this project can be found in Nadegger (2023)