(Re)Conceptualising Unfamiliar Landscapes

This chapter reflects on the contributions to this volume. It teases out select conceptual strands that cut across the papers, articulating these in ways that might prompt further reflections on notions of unfamiliarity—both within and beyond pedagogies and practices of outdoor education. It considers three key concerns. First, it draws together the multiple registers—discursive, emotional, embodied, material—in and through which the unfamiliar is constituted. Second, and related, it examines a key tension in the book: whether the unfamiliar is correlated with particular places or ‘kinds’ of landscapes—or whether the unfamiliar is something that (human) actors ‘bring’ with them to those places. Third, this chapter highlights one of the book’s key contributions: drawing out questions of social difference (especially ethnicity, class and gender) in terms of questions of power, access and marginalisation, in and from unfamiliar landscapes.