Hiking England’s National Trails: a journey through whiteness, rural nationalism and contested national belonging
Supervisors: Dr. Marco Antonsich and Dr. Azmeary Ferdoush
This research project focuses on the English National Trails network and its ties to whiteness and performed rural nationalisms. English rural and wild spaces have undergone legacies of exclusionary hegemonic profiteering by means of land ownership, community erasure, nationalist discourses and practices, as well as marginalised belonging from the predominantly white, upper/middle-class elite. This exclusionary barrier to ‘access’ for many individuals and groups defined in cultural, class and/or ethno-racial terms has been cloaked by generations of publicity and community rhetoric that normalise the culture of the outdoors as ‘free’ and ‘inclusive’ spaces of leisure for ‘everyone’.
The aim of this project is to critically analyse this narrative in order to expose the inherent contradictions it presents in relation to issues of race, whiteness and national belonging. It will do so mainly through an auto-ethnographic account, complemented by archival research, photography as a means of documentation, and individual interviews with key stakeholders and members of the public.