The focus is on the concept of ‘Style’ and its role in the formation of identity and belonging as they relate to broader mountain use, alongside how such concepts create a stratum of meaning and importance amongst various mountain users, from the casual, to the professional. This is especially important in our digital age, where social media has become an essential, yet often maligned tool for sharing mountain experiences, with certain ‘styles’ coming to represent best practice, whilst others are positioned as wasteful, destructive, and contributing the our changing environment.

‘Style’ is a concept that informs how people dress, with a mixture of practical, and sartorial, alongside how they choose to interact with mountain spaces (what sport, or activity they pursue). But it is also philosophical in nature, informing how these spaces are viewed, and conceptualised, while underlining various aspects of best practice, such as the stewardship mountain regions, and representing areas of conflict, or tensions between one group and another.

This topic has emerged from a long-standing interest in understanding how landscape functions as a repository of social and cultural history, belonging, identity, and experience. Specifically, how identity can be integrally wrapped up in the pursuit of activities that take one from the comforts of home into a potentially difficult and dangerous environment. And how the digital space has informed and shaped out understandings of mountainous regions, and how we should, or could be interacting with them.