Paper short abstract:

Through extensive experiences and fieldwork in white-water kayaking, I hope to explore and discuss what it can mean to bear responsibility for extinction, by attending with attention and care to unfamiliar terrain.

Paper long abstract:

Based on extensive experiences and fieldwork in white-water kayaking, this paper explores how risk and fear are realised as scholarly activities of attention and care whilst reading and navigating river’s white-water terrain. I will focus on how limiting emotional influences - while reading, enacting and making decisions to navigate class 4-5 white-water - can lead to a more rational and balanced way to move forward in difficult terrain. Furthermore, I will consider what experiences of studying difficult white-water, and its details with attention and care, can tell us about the conflicting side of carelessness, that is panic. Panic can be thought of here as a type of carelessness to attend responsibly to the unfamiliar or unknown, therefore limiting individual’s possibility to move forward in unfamiliar terrain. Hence, we might consider that it is panic’s carelessness whilst engaging with the unfamiliar and the unknown that can lead towards extinction. The main questions to be addressed, will be (1) What can we learn about managing fear from participating in a limit environment and its terrain, with attention and care? (2) What does panic’s carelessness tell us about absence of responsibility? (3) What are the disabling consequences of panic’s overwhelming reaction and its lack of responsibility, in reference to moving towards extinction?