This study examines the hitherto under-explored relationships between weather, human action and the natural environment from a practice-based perspective. Using an ethnographic study on wilderness guiding in Finnish Lapland, the article first examines the integral role of weather when conceptualizing tourist activities taking place outdoors. The authors identify three types of weather-related practices: anticipating and coping with the weather, as well as discursive practices related to weather. They therefore demonstrate how weather manipulates human practices by narrowing down or extending the possibilities for outdoor activities. Second, by materializing weather, the study provides a more nuanced understanding of the diverse ways in which weather – a material entity in itself – is involved in the enactment of various socio-material practices; here the authors make the case for a specific repertoire of weather-wise skills. The study concludes that weather holds agency as it exerts a significant power in directing and redirecting human nature-based activities.

We argue that the healthy, fit and athletic body plays an essential role in the way contemporary managerial identities are construed. Drawing on insights from Judith Butler, we study these bodily identities as a form of regulation in organizations. We identify the cultural basis of regulation, show how it operates through specific norms, and detail how it implies gender. Based on an empirical study of men and women in management who are passionate about their healthy and fit bodies and athletic lifestyles, we demonstrate how norms set by managerial athleticism – understood as a particular regulative regime – operate through three discursive practices: perfecting the body, advocating against non-fit bodies, and becoming a role model. We show how the norms operate in both explicit and abject fashion and how they are implied in masculine language and materialized in physical (athletic) bodies. We offer new insights on how bodily identity regulation occurs and elucidate the gendered complexity and contradictions inscribed in managerial athleticism.

The current Earthly crisis demands new imaginings, conceptualisations and practices of tourism. This paper develops a post-anthropocentric approach to envisioning the possibilities of the ‘proximate’ in tourism settings. The existing generic definitions of proximity tourism refer to a form of tourism that emphasises local destinations, short distances and lower-carbon modes of transport, as well as the mundane exceptionality of the ordinary. We conceptualise proximity tourism with feminist new materialist literature, which accords agency to the ongoing common worlding of all matter—including but not limited to humans—rather than to separate individual agents. More specifically, our research explores the idea of proximity by drawing closer to the geo—to the Earth—through geological walks in the Pyhä National Park in Finnish Lapland. We analyse these walks with the notions of rhythmicity, vitality and care—ideas constructed from the theoretical heritage guiding our study. By doing this, we explore the potential of proximity tourism in ways that intertwine non-living and living matter, science stories, history, local communities and tourism. The outcome of this analysis, we propose, composes one possible narrative of tourism after the Anthropocene.

The significance of body and gender in the formation of consumers’ identities and agencies has been widely scrutinized. Nevertheless, this study argues that this formation is not fully understood, unless the role of height is taken into account. It leans on a practice-based perspective and critical auto-ethnographic methodology so as to examine how a distinct agency is fabricated for a short-sized female body by a whole range of social, material, and sensory practices that are continuously enacted across various domains of life. It thereby adds to the existing literature on body, gender, and consumer agency by way of incorporating height into critical inquiries this far mostly concerned with weight; by way of materializing and sensorializing the fabrication of an embodied consumer agency this far addressed in visual terms; and by way of considering everyday life as the site in which it continuously unfolds. These insights bear important implications for the development of body politics.