Search

This article engages Rosi Braidotti's writing on COVID-19 and affirmative ethics to expand understandings of the purpose of leisure and physical activity in women's lives during the pandemic. Utilizing a feminist methodology informed by an ethics of affirmation, care, and creativity, the authors share insights from in-depth interviews with five dedicated Yoga practitioners living in Aotearoa New Zealand. Herein, they reveal how Yoga's physical, mental, and ethical practices supported women as they navigated numerous challenges during the pandemic. The authors discuss the women's complex experiences of affect, including shared exhaustion and compassion. Finally, they illustrate how experiences of discomfort encouraged some women to rethink collective responsibility and experiment with communal solutions to better support others in the face of uncertain futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A plethora of research has focused on how the pandemic has shifted human relations with space, place and wellbeing. Yet, to date few have focused on how the return to public spaces after extended periods of lockdown is impacting subjective wellbeing, particularly amidst a context with fluctuating levels of risk, rapidly changing policy demands and expectations, and different affective responses to such regulations. In this paper we re-turn with the voices of 17 women who were living in Aotearoa New Zealand during the early stages of the pandemic and working in the sport or fitness industry before, during and after the first national lockdown. Drawing upon insights from feminist materialist theory, we explore how indoor fitness studios materialised as 'riskscapes' in women's negotiations of the affects that shaped their re-turn. Whereas some women experienced fear and anxiety in re-turning to familiar spaces 'made strange' through new risks, responsibilities, routines and objects (i.e. sanitizer, floor markings), others came to new appreciations for the importance of human connection offered through shared movement experiences. Conceptualizing these different affective relations as processes of becoming, we trace the multiple and more-thanhuman relations through which wellbeing and risk were co-implicated in particular ways of knowing-moving-becoming in the re-turn to fitness. Recognising the effects of continued uncertainties, this paper contributes material feminist insights through women's affective engagements with the social world, surfacing more-than-human wellbeing in the processes of re-turning to familiar spaces 'made strange' in and through pandemic space and time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we draw upon the ethico-onto-epistemology of feminist new materialisms to reflect on our experiences as feminists doing research on women's embodied experiences of sport, fitness, and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic. For qualitative researchers around the world, COVID-19 presented a radically changed research environment. For many, the shift to doing digital interviews required the navigation of unfamiliar technologies and experimenting with different strategies for establishing connections through computer screens. As feminist scholars, working together and with the participants during times of increased stress and uncertainty prompted us to reimagine our ethical research practices. In this article, we engage and extend Rosi Braidotti's writing on affirmative ethics and offer our personal experiences of grappling with the affective intensities of pandemic while doing ethical feminist research. Through this creative inquiry, we describe supporting one another through research and illustrate how the unique intersections of work, family, health, isolation, and exhaustion were influencing our own and participants' lives differently. Engaging with Braidotti's writings on affirmative ethics in the posthuman convergence, we illuminate the ways that our digital-material experiences and the human/nonhuman aspects of the research processes were re-turning our ethical considerations. Researching together, with a focus on creating space for the voices of women who have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19, we found moments of hope and joy as we creatively imagined expansive potentials for feminist research, fostered through caring collaborations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has radically shifted modes of communication and connection. For many, digital technologies have played critical roles in enabling ongoing relationships during extended periods of social isolation. Yet the modes of connection offered through such technologies have prompted new affective relations and digital intimacies. In this article, we draw upon interviews with 17 women working in the sport and fitness sector in Aotearoa New Zealand to explore their engagement with digital technologies during pandemic times. Each of the women responded to the nationwide lockdown by offering and participating in online fitness classes, using shared movement experiences to cultivate supportive emotional relations for their communities. Drawing upon the theoretical insights of feminist materialisms, this paper contributes to deeper understandings of how digital intimacies produce a reimagining of felt community relations through entanglements of technology, virtual touch and haptic connections. The co-constitution of physical-digital spaces is enacted by women through an ethos of care that is lived through moving bodies together-apart. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Objective: This study evaluates Drunken Rewind, an animated digital media campaign designed to reduce binge drinking. Participants: The campaign was targeted to white males aged 18–34, who are at the highest risk of binge drinking. Methods: The intervention consisted of an animated series that merged health communications approaches with marketing strategies to disseminate health messages. Digital metrics and comments were analyzed to assess receptivity toward the intervention. Results: The series amassed over 900,000 views and 1,762 followers across four social media platforms. Viewer retention rate was between 67%–73% over three seasons; 68.3% of comments on the videos were positive. Conclusions: This study adds evidence that a digital intervention aimed at reducing binge drinking can be feasibly implemented and positively received by a population that is difficult to reach with health messaging. This approach may be useful when applied to other health issues young adults perceive to have lower risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the gendered, disruptive effects and affective intensities of COVID-19 and the ways that women working in the sport and fitness sector were prompted to establish more-than-human connection through technologies, the environment, and objects. Bringing together theoretical and embodied insights from object interviews with 17 women sport and fitness professionals (i.e., athletes, coaches, instructors) in Aotearoa New Zealand, this paper advances a relational understanding of the multiple human and nonhuman forces that shape and transform women's wellbeing during pandemic. Drawing upon particular feminist materialisms (i.e., Barad, Braidotti, Bennett), we reconceptualize wellbeing to move beyond biomedical formulations of health or illness. Through our analysis and discussion, we trace embodied ways of knowing that produce wellbeing as a more-than-human entanglement, a gendered phenomenon that can be understood as an ongoing negotiation of affective, material, cultural, technological and environmental forces during a period of disruption and uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic is a serious threat to global health and there is currently an unprecedented research effort to deliver an effective COVID-19 vaccine. Yet an increasingly vocal movement has the potential to erode support in vaccination. This study examined shifts in vaccine opposition on Twitter. A search query collected publicly available Twitter posts related to vaccine opposition and posts were categorized into themes. Coders compared conversation during the four months before COVID-19 spread in the United States (10/15/2019 to 2/14/2020) to four subsequent months (2/15/2020 to 6/14/2020) of community spread. Across time periods, vaccine opposition on Twitter increased by 80%. Twelve conversation themes were identified and tracked across time periods, with increases observed in percentage of conversation about COVID-19, federal health authorities, vaccine ingredients, and research/ clinical trials. This study quantified the increase in vaccine opposition on Twitter and suggests that vaccine opponents are fomenting opposition toward a COVID-19 vaccine and encouraging mistrust in health authorities. Vaccine beliefs are a spectrum, with support and opposition existing as a range. Exposure to these increased amounts of vaccine opposition may encourage those who are vaccine hesitant or have questions about vaccines to move toward opposition, which could have drastic health impacts at a population level for decades to come. To ensure the widest support for a COVID-19 vaccine, it is important to identify and address the messages used by vaccine opponents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engaging a feminist ethnographic methodology, this article offers a discussion of women's embodied experiences of wellbeing in intergenerational somatic dance classes. Somatic dance classes aim to develop embodied awareness, support ease and freedom in movement, and offer opportunities for creativity, agency and reflection. Drawing on in-depth interviews, observation and autoethnographic vignettes, three themes emerged from the empirical material that expand understandings of wellbeing as a fluid and dynamic experience, reveal the value for women in moving for movement's sake, and identify the significance of intergenerational contexts for moving together. As a consequence, this research offers insight into ways in which women participating in somatic dance classes have re-interpreted wellbeing practices, 're-claiming' wellbeing from circulating neoliberal, self-improvement and productivity agendas, and instead, dancing into wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]