'It's Going to Be Very Slippery': Snow, Space and Mobility While Learning Cross-Country Skiing

This chapter examines how a child learns to sense and move through a transient environment while recreational cross-country skiing. A mobile video ethnography was undertaken of a parent instructing a novice child on how to ski. Using interactional analysis, the paper examines how snow is sensed, felt and made salient in spatio-interactional practices, and how the snowscape is (re)territorialised by the participants making temporary tracks in the snow. In this way, tracks can shape future mobile actions and immanent pedagogical activities within the practices of cross-country skiing, which inculcate the child’s feeling for an ephemeral geography of snow.