The Mountaineering Culture Studies Group will bring together scholars from different parts of the academy – and the world – to discuss and present work surrounding the literature and culture of mountaineering. The textual and, more recently, cinematographic traditions around mountaineering uniquely unite some of the most influential intellectual strands of our world: post-colonialist thought, eco-critical and conservationalist approaches to literature, discourses of travel and exploration, social and ecological changes from commerce and tourism, use of language to express severe physical experience, transnational ethnographies and anthropologies, oropolitical testimonies, and registers of language for recording extreme emotional experience.

Since the beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century, the forms and stakes of representations surrounding mountaineering have multiplied. What we now have is a body of material of remarkable diversity and inter-disciplinary potential. Frank Smythe’s assemblages of photographs with text to inaugurate the picture travel book, Eric Shipton’s astonishingly nostalgic yet grittily detailed expedition reports, Sherry Ortner and Stanley Stevens’s anthropological and ethnographical work on culturally and environmentally endangered geographies, Uma Prasad Mukherjee’s lyrical travel narratives in Bengali, Harish Kapadia’s deeply invested conservation writings and travel guides, Peter Hopkirk’s thrilling tale of a century of espionage and infiltration around Tibet and the roof of the world, Nicholas Roerich’s richly mesmerised and mesmerising paintings, and Maria Coffey’s introspective use of writing as a means of coming to terms with profound loss, number only some of the work we may discuss.

The second half of the twentieth century onwards, mountaineering has increasingly constituted a global undertaking: teams composed of climbers from different countries, funded internationally, crossed international borders to access new routes for scaling geological formations considered to ‘belong’ to no one country but to the world. Long before globalization became a topical issue, mountaineering – and the literature it spawned – served as a microcosm in which to explore the opportunities of transnational endeavour. This has not occurred without suspicion and tension: witness the widely reported ‘indifference’ of certain teams to suffering counterparts during recent Himalayan tragedies. Yet, the principle, namely that people from around the world should enjoy equal access to these geological formations, remains a beguiling example of how to think differently about both enterprise and the environment.

The workshop will meet every three weeks to focus critical attention on works in progress by members, and other scholars and practitioners leading the field. Published work in various forms – books, journals, ephemera, films, photographs, climbing manuals, transcriptions of audio-footage from climbers, Web sites and blogs – will structure discussion. Its fourth month onwards, the Group will welcome scholars whose pioneering works have in many ways established the scope of this wide field (among them, Audrey Salkeld, Harish Kapadia, Stewart Weaver, and Maurice Isserman). The Group will aim to make a lasting contribution to the academic – and wider – community by foregrounding a set of texts and concerns that probe and enlarge the scope of methodological and critical tools in scholarship across disciplines, and manners of enjoying responsibly the world we live in. Finally, the Group will aim by year’s end to bring about a conference or a publication of collected essays by members, or both.