Abstract
This chapter explores how the risks of climbing, those that are often portrayed as ‘extraordinary’, are made sensible through the slow inculcation of a perceptual schema adjusted to making sense of vertical environments. In these spaces, as climbers experiment with movement—adapting body to terrain—experience is folded into climbing logics, which produce vertical terrains as possible lines of movement that offer points of risk and safety. As these perceptions develop, climbers must also actively engage in ‘emotional callusing’. This chapter argues that climbers must reflexively struggle with their own anxieties and fears through appeals to climbing logics of risk. Finally, while climbers embark on making the extraordinary ordinary, the appeal of dangerous spaces is found through the safeties of day-to-day neoliberal being.
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Bunn, M. (2022). The Edgeworker’s Habitus: Climbing and Ordinary Risks. In: Świtek, B., Abramson, A., Swee, H. (eds) Extraordinary Risks, Ordinary Lives. Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83962-8_7
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