Confronting and (Re)constructing “Conquest Culture” in Outdoor Adventure: A Critical Analysis of #Microadventure Content on Facebook and Instagram

Abstract

Underpinned by Romantic wilderness ideals and American settler colonialism, recurring themes of “conquest culture” in outdoor adventure—social privilege, individualism, and exploitation—are carried out on social media. This study explores how an emerging topic, microadventures, may reinforce or resist these dominant discourses in outdoor adventure. Facebook and Instagram posts tagged “#microadventure” were collected and analyzed using a qualitative critical social media content analysis informed by Hall’s (1973) Theory of Encoding and Decoding. We found that half of the posts reinforced conquest culture, while the other half resisted. The discussion of our findings, framed as a critique of neoliberalism, seeks to interrogate, from a U.S. perspective, how conquest culture is perpetuated by representations of adventure across the global social media landscape. Our findings suggest the need to deconstruct market-driven, colonial tendencies in outdoor social media by (1) confronting dominant conquest discourses and (2) (re)constructing neoliberal tendencies in the outdoor field.