So many cold water swimmers are non-conformists, but who would have thought of it as a political act? Grace Wright-Arora carried out social research on cold water swimming for her undergraduate dissertation at the University of Bristol. She interviewed outdoor swimmers in London and near Bristol, and found that for many, swimming was a way of resisting norms and structures that confine them in everyday life. Like size-ism, that people have to fit bodily norms dictated to them by health authorities or the fashion industry (strange bedfellows, it seems to me). And linked to that, pool-ism - that you need to have a certain type of body to swim in a pool or run the risk of being judged by others. Or the physical structure of the pool itself, dictating how you can swim –up, then down, then up again, and again and again. Or the political-economic structures that deem it OK to dump raw sewage into rivers. In this podcast, she describes her own cold water swimming history, what took her to study the often personal politics of cold water swimming, and discusses with Stanley Ulijaszek her findings.
