Examining attitudes towards inclusion and social justice among U.S. Climbers: analysis and findings from a national survey

ABSTRACT

Climbing in the U.S. resembles other ‘alternative’ and ‘lifestyle’ sports in that it has long been an exclusionary leisure pursuit. Whiteness, a history of land dispossession, and settler colonialism have reinforced exclusive boundaries to the sport through a ‘hierarchy of participation’. Formal moves from climbing advocacy organisations, gyms, and brands have increased diversity and justice efforts in climbing through funding, pledges, and social media messaging. However, these initiatives receive varied support from within climbing communities. This paper employs a social-psychological approach to examine which factors likely help shape and maintain variation in U.S. climbers’ concern for matters related to inclusion and justice in climbing. We draw data from a national survey conducted in collaboration with the national advocacy organisation Access Fund. We then apply multiple regression to examine how various climbing and demographic attributes are associated with inclusion and justice concerns by testing three hypotheses: experienced privilege and/or marginalisation, partisan political affiliation, and issue prominence. Our findings suggest that variation in climbers’ inclusion and justice attitudes appears driven more by respondents’ affiliation with one or more marginalised identities, political leanings, and other sociodemographic characteristics that we suggest are representative of the ‘politics of everyday life’.

KEYWORDS:

• Rock climbers
• inclusion
• justice
• Native lands
• recreation

Acknowledgements

David Carter would like to thank Access Fund for the collaboration that made this study possible, and the contributions of Chris Winter, Gareth Martins, Holly Smolenski, and Jordan Fisher in particular.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Propositions, as the term is used here, outline general and descriptive theoretical expectations, as opposed to hypotheses, which identify narrowly specified relationships between variables (Shoemaker et al., 2003, p. 38).

2. Bartle and Laycock (2012) refer to divergences in political parties/candidates on a given issue when discussing ‘weight’. We mean among a climbing community, more generally.

3. It is worth noting that we tried other indicators of issue prominence, notably the proportion of different racial and ethnic categories by ZCTA, with similar results.

4. Other specifications warrant mention. We included Native-climbing interest overlap variables in which proximity was defined as within 50, 100, and 200 miles, and a continuous indicator of the distance from the closest site. All yielded null results. We also created a measure that reflected the distance between a respondent’s ZIP code and the nearest Reservation or Federally Recognized Tribal Entity (per the Bureau of Indian Affairs) or Alaska Native Village (per the US Census Bureau), with similarly null findings. We include only one of measure here, for the sake of parsimony.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Flynn

John Flynn is the Assistant Director of the American West Center and a Ph.D. candidate in American history at the University of Utah. His research focuses on public lands in the American West and the intersections of environment, outdoor recreation, and Indigenous history.

David P. Carter

David P. Carter is an Associate Professor of public policy and administration at the University of Utah, where he researches public policy design and implementation, civic recreation, and collective action in climbing communities, among other topics.

Leandra H. Hernández

Leandra H. Hernándezis an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah. She teaches and researches at the intersections of journalism, media ethics, health communication, and intersectionality in rock climbing and outdoor recreation contexts.

Garrett Hutson

Garrett Hutson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies at Brock University. His primary research interests are in person-environment relationships, outdoor recreation, climbing communities, and sustainability.