Theorising therapeutic accretion:

swimming as a health-enabling practice across the lifecourse

Abstract

Drawing from an increased interest in blue space as a setting for health and wellbeing, a range of new theoretical ideas have emerged from within that space. Across different settings and practices, marine and inland, there is a strong immersive element that connects with wider theoretical work on therapeutic landscapes and assemblages of health. This paper will utilise a particular blue space practice, swimming, to develop a theoretical approach that foregrounds embodied, emotional and experiential dimensions of what can be termed therapeutic accretion. Swimming across the lifecourse is built on multiple ‘blue moments’, both positive and negative. These emerge from a series of intimate immersions and exposures, which represent an affective place capture around water that help promote wellbeing in its broadest sense. While swimming can be and is a risky practice, this is countered by its acknowledged benefits for physical, and increasingly, mental health and wellbeing. Therapeutic accretion specifically identifies positive exposures to places, spaces and communities that build assemblages of health and resilience across time and space. Based on empirical research within Ireland and wider recent writing on swimming, the terms immersion and exposure are used to illustrate how therapeutic accretion develops and concretises over time, yet also ebbs and flows across the lifecourse. Identifying swimming as a process of therapeutic accretion within blue space adds to wider nature-based practices research that documents how such practices, individual and communal, act as empowering bonds between people and place.