Becoming-Rock - A relational materialist analysis of outdoor rock-climbing Escalatamasters

Abstract Increasingly, scholars link dominating perceptions and anthropocentric worldviews to the troublesome events of human-induced climate change and interconnected social crises. This research responds to the call for an ontological shift, aiming to leave the Cartesian lineage of thought that dominates contemporary Western thinking and being, by exploring what possibilities may emerge from decentring the human in favour of more-than-human processes and the agency of matter in the context of outdoor rock-climbing. This paper draws on qualitative data from focus group interviews and observations of a group of rock-climbers based on their experiences from a six-day outdoor rock-climbing event in Spain. We employ a relational materialist approach to collect and analyse the empirical materials, focusing on becoming and the agency of matter to rethink the relationship between humans and the environment. The relational materialist analysis leads to ethical considerations in the face of precarious environmental times. Our findings suggest that climbers are always already entangled in place, pointing to the gap between outdoor rock-climbing discourses and embodied practice. As such, we conceptualise climbing as a process shaped by entangled, technologically mediated more-than-human processes rather than a product of human domination and superiority over nature. This perspective makes the separation of humans and the environment impossible. Thus, we suggest that the relational material perspective fosters ethically responsible research practices by engaging with the often overlooked more-than-human elements and consequently increases the attentiveness to material relationships in outdoor adventure sports discourses that go beyond dominant human-centred conceptualisations.