Mountain Stories, Mountain Futures

Jason König
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  • HISTORY

Welcome to the Mountain Stories, Mountain Futures podcast! The aim of the podcast is to bring to light new stories and new perspectives on mountain landscapes and mountain communities around the world, with help from a wide range of expert guests. The podcast showcases exciting new academic research on mountain history, and work by creative practitioners engaging with mountain landscapes in a range of different media.

Episodes

  1. Into the Mountain with Simone Kenyon

    JAN 28

    Into the Mountain with Simone Kenyon

    In this episode Jonathan Pitches and Jason König interview Simone Kenyon about her work as a practice researcher, performer, artist and producer. We focus especially on her work as the choreographer and artistic creator of the place-sensitive performance piece Into the Mountain, inspired and informed by the lyrical and embodied prose of Nan Shepherd’s 1974 book, The Living Mountain.  Building on six years of preparatory work Into the Mountain drew on the input of nearly 100 women, many of whom reside in the Cairngorm area, and merged guided walking practices with choreography, and a 22-piece choir singing a newly composed piece.  The episode begins with some discussion of Simone’s early experiences of walking and mountains growing up in Bradford, West Yorkshire and then in the Lake District. We then discuss some of Simone’s earlier work on a range of outdoor walking art projects, for example her project in 2006 The Pennine Way: The Legs that Make Us with Tamara Ashley, and the way in which that helped to shape her conceptions of walking as an aesthetic practice. The bulk of the episode then focuses on the Into the Mountain project. Simone talks about the influence of Nan Shepherd on the project and about her engagement with the bodily routines of climbing and mountaineering in her choreography. We discuss some of the practices and methodologies that lie at the heart of the project, for example the dance practice of ‘Body Weather’ and the way in which it helps to challenge conceptions of the separation between body and environment. Simone also talks about some of the practical challenges of the project: for example, negotiations with landowners in the Cairngorms. Finally we look ahead to some possible future projects, and future prospects for rethinking human relationships with mountain landscapes and engaging with mountain communities in Scotland and beyond. This episode was edited by Zofia Guertin. You can follow the project on Bluesky @futuremountain.bsky.social To learn more about the Mountain Stories, Mountain Futures project please visit our website here (https://msmf.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk)

    51 min
  2. Xenophobic Mountains with Alexandra Cotofana

    12/16/2025

    Xenophobic Mountains with Alexandra Cotofana

    In this episode, Jason König and Jonathan Westaway interview Alexandra Cotofana about her work on the mountains of Romania.  Alexandra is a cultural anthropologist and Assistant Professor at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi. She is the author of Xenophobic Mountains. Landscape sentience reconsidered in the Romanian Carpathians, (2022), and co-editor of Sentient Ecologies: Xenophobic Imaginaries of Landscape (2022). The episode begins with a discussion of Alexandra’s experience of growing in the Carpathian mountains in Romania, and with some reflections on the challenges of doing ethnography in a community you are close to. We then turn to Alexandra’s Xenophobic Mountains book. Alexandra starts by explaining the concept of sentient and xenophobic landscape. She contextualises it in relation to recent developments in anthropology and in the humanities more broadly which question the dominance of rationalising, western modes of thought, and ask us to ‘take other world views seriously’, including notions of the agency of landscape and other non-human entities.  We then go on to talk about the way in which those ideas apply in Romanian history. We discuss the stories that circulated around the crash of an Israeli Defence Force helicopter in the Romanian mountains in 2010, where the mountain was said to have caused the crash. We talk among other things about how those ideas are paralleled in other cultures and how they have been shaped by the experience of occupation and resistance in Romanian history. We also discuss how the prevalence of these ideas in the mountain regions of the country can help us to understand the rise of right-wing nationalism that has had international prominence recently in the Romanian presidential elections of 2025. Alexandra discusses future plans for a history of mountain huts in Romania and the way in which they have been intertwined with national discourse throughout the 20th century and beyond. The podcast ends with some final reflections on why it is an urgent priority to understand the entanglement between mountain communities and nationalist discourse better. This episode was edited by Zofia Guertin. For a version of our podcast with closed captions and transcript please visit this link. To learn more about the Mountain Stories, Mountain Futures project please visit our website here (https://msmf.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk)

    50 min
  • 2 Episodes

About

Welcome to the Mountain Stories, Mountain Futures podcast! The aim of the podcast is to bring to light new stories and new perspectives on mountain landscapes and mountain communities around the world, with help from a wide range of expert guests. The podcast showcases exciting new academic research on mountain history, and work by creative practitioners engaging with mountain landscapes in a range of different media.

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