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Apartheid in the digital outdoors?: an analysis of the Instagram content of outdoor brands in the US, UK and Scandinavia
School of Design, Middlesex University, UK.ORCID iD: 0000-0003-4778-2161
Umeå University, Faculty of Arts, Department of culture and media studies. (Digsum)ORCID iD: 0000-0003-3665-2476
2025 (English)In: Journal of Leisure Research, ISSN 0022-2216, E-ISSN 2159-6417, Vol. 56, no 5, p. 760-780Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

The outdoors offers widely understood health and wellbeing benefits and provides an unparalleled resource for the realization and projection of identity, from the personal to the national. Yet access to the outdoors in the countries of the global North is manifestly unequal, with BIPOC communities typically much less likely than their white counterparts to participate in outdoor leisure activities such as hiking, trail running, cycling, climbing, etc. This study revisits the hypothesis that outdoors media plays a central role in perpetuating what Martin (Citation2004) terms “apartheid in the Great Outdoors” by performing a content analysis of the Instagram posts of the top 10 outdoor brands in the US, Scandinavia and UK between the spring and summer seasons of 2020 – a period when the global pandemic restricted access to the outdoors at the same time as the Black Lives Matter movement raised awareness of systemic racial inequalities. The analysis reveals that whilst there is a purposeful response to calls to diversify the outdoors in the representational strategies of US outdoor brands, this is not the case in the UK and Scandinavia. In these locations the digital outdoors and its associated leisure identities remain overwhelmingly white, young, straight, and able-bodied.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Routledge, 2025. Vol. 56, no 5, p. 760-780
Keywords [en]
Outdoor brands, Instagram, diversity, pandemic
National Category
Media and Communication Studies
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-231413DOI: 10.1080/00222216.2024.2407114ISI: 001346935000001Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85209094421OAI: oai:DiVA.org:umu-231413DiVA, id: diva2:1910539
Available from: 2024-11-05 Created: 2024-11-05 Last updated: 2025-12-10Bibliographically approved

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Eriksson Krutrök, Moa

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