adele pavlidis
Griffith University, Griffith Centre for Cultural Research, Faculty Member
- Adele Pavlidis is an interdisciplinary sociologist currently based at Griffith University. Her work examines the way... moreAdele Pavlidis is an interdisciplinary sociologist currently based at Griffith University. Her work examines the ways sport and leisure can be understood as spaces of transformation and 'becoming'. Influenced by Deleuze and Guattari, Irigaray, and contemporary feminist writing on affect (Probyn, Ahmed, Blackman and others), Adele's intellectual concern is with the possibility of a feminine cultural imaginary and a future open to possibility.edit
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As an emerging researcher working in the field of leisure studies, I explore auto/ethnographic writing as a valuable methodological approach. Focusing on contemporary roller derby in the Australian context I grapple with the complexities... more
As an emerging researcher working in the field of leisure studies, I explore auto/ethnographic writing as a valuable methodological approach. Focusing on contemporary roller derby in the Australian context I grapple with the complexities of “resistance” within this women-centred sport, privileging affect as surfaced through the research process and writing. This article explores the possibilities inherent in research that makes visible the paradoxes and ambiguities of resistance in leisure. Shame and hurt—although uncomfortable for the researcher and perhaps for the reader—are important affects to incorporate into feminist analyses if we are to continue to explore new questions, and identify ways to theorise the complexity of gender power relations as they are embodied in leisure.
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This article narrates the affects and experiences of the CaiRollers, the first and only roller derby team in Egypt. Through visual affective discourse analysis of their Instagram account and interviews with team members, the article... more
This article narrates the affects and experiences of the CaiRollers, the first and only roller derby team in Egypt. Through visual affective discourse analysis of their Instagram account and interviews with team members, the article addresses the question: What do physical practices such as roller derby ‘do’ in e/affecting and mobilising change? In conversation with feminisms from the Middle East, our analysis highlights how the team’s ‘sisterhood’ is a site of affective politics that transcends the roller derby track. At the same time, a desire to be tough and to embrace risk permeated the CaiRollers discourses. Yet, while the team has established its legitimacy within the transnational roller derby community, we narrate the obstacles they face in Egypt. In sum, we found that the CaiRollers involvement in roller derby was entangled in mobilising change in political movements, gender politics, transnational mobilities and questions of legitimacy and sport.
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Research Interests: Psychology, Sport Policy, Doping, Sport, Drug Policy, and 4 moreDrugs, Counterfiets, Doping in Sport, and Elsevier
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Despite the proliferation of doctoral training courses within universities, little attention is paid to the complexity of supervision as a process of becoming for both students and super-visors. As post-qualitative researchers we explore... more
Despite the proliferation of doctoral training courses within universities, little attention is paid to the complexity of supervision as a process of becoming for both students and super-visors. As post-qualitative researchers we explore how collaborative writing can be mobilised as a rhizomatic practice to open up engagements with supervision that counter hierarchical master/apprentice models of knowledge transmission. Researching-writing through our own knowledge practices and affective investments we engage with supervision as an assemblage that produces multiplicity. We created a democratic learning alliance through an electronic writing forum. These collaborative e-writing practices generated insights into, and movements through, critical moments that disrupted the doctoral experience of progress (writers block, self-doubt, misunderstanding). We theorise collaborative writing as a rhizomatic practice that refuses ontological assumptions of linearity, causality and rationality, ...
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In this chapter we examine women’s creative practices through everyday ‘cultural making’ that recognises the multiplicity of subjectivity, challenging singular and personal notions of recovery. Our ficto-critical approach employs digital... more
In this chapter we examine women’s creative practices through everyday ‘cultural making’ that recognises the multiplicity of subjectivity, challenging singular and personal notions of recovery. Our ficto-critical approach employs digital blogs to move beyond ‘arts as therapy’ and examine the utopias of the everyday through which women opened up creative lines of flight through engaging with different materials, objects and aesthetics. Drawing on the notion of haecceities, we also challenge the forces that devitalise women’s wellbeing to consider the different intensities and the multiple affects produced through creative practices. We also consider how hauntings could be immobilising, but also open up desires that enable change. Hence our use of metaphoric imaginings considers how through literal and imagined movement women could enact a more vital future.
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Promoting habits of coping through cognitive behaviour therapy has become a standard policy response to depression, yet such neoliberal appeals to self-care ignore the performative demands of gender that shape the emergence and recurrence... more
Promoting habits of coping through cognitive behaviour therapy has become a standard policy response to depression, yet such neoliberal appeals to self-care ignore the performative demands of gender that shape the emergence and recurrence of depression. We explore Karen Barad’s notion of nonlinear enfolding through the gendered ‘life course’ as a dynamic relation of spacetime mattering, marked by the heteronormative ‘transitions’ of puberty, motherhood and menopause. Acknowledging the more-than-human relationality of depression-recovery, we consider how biomedical expertise and objects (anti-depressants, ‘the pill’, Hormone Replacement Therapy, natural therapies, waiting lists, therapist bodies) are imbricated in women’s recovery. What becomes muted is the indeterminacy of distress (beyond normative depressive classification), the harmful effects of medication and other ways of ‘doing’ recovery in care-full ways (organisationally, politically, economically).
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This chapter explores the everyday habits and rhythms of embodied movement that produce different forces and intensities, offering possibilities for transformation. Through the story-event of little public spheres, we examine the... more
This chapter explores the everyday habits and rhythms of embodied movement that produce different forces and intensities, offering possibilities for transformation. Through the story-event of little public spheres, we examine the entanglements of the personal-pleasurable-political to trouble normalised notions of recovery as a personal endeavour. Deploying the notion of bodyminds, the chapter explores the porosity and permeability of bodies and their sensory engagement with the material world. We also consider how capacities are enacted, opening up lines of flight that contest the forces of bad feelings. Central to the relationality of movement are the often surprising constitutive effects and affects of immersive bodymind practices. Intra-actions with non-human elements through visceral bodymind connections offered possibilities for different rhythms and expansive repertories of recovery.
This chapter explores the visceral materiality of the knot to think through the rhizomatic movement of depression-recovery, where bad feelings produce and are produced through the disruptive affects of women’s lives. There is an ongoing... more
This chapter explores the visceral materiality of the knot to think through the rhizomatic movement of depression-recovery, where bad feelings produce and are produced through the disruptive affects of women’s lives. There is an ongoing need to surface the gendering of depression and recovery in order to disrupt the individualising of responsibility and self-blame for ‘bad feelings’. The ontological assumptions of the biopsychosocial model wilfully and irresponsibly ignore the sociocultural, economic and political conditions. As an alternative we think with the biopsychosocialities and affective forces that act through women’s different capacities and desires. Rather than abandon subjectivity in favour of pure externality—networks, assemblages, flows and so on—we think them together as post-humanist feminism concerned with the affective contours of contemporary life.
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This article investigates how safety is experienced, navigated and cultivated by women on Instagram. Using qualitative interview data, we explore women’s understanding and practices of keeping them...
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Largely taboo in ‘Westernized’ nations, spitting in public remains common in many parts of the world. Public health campaigns ‘beyond the West’ tend to stress that spitting in public spreads diseases and is also, in essence, disgusting,... more
Largely taboo in ‘Westernized’ nations, spitting in public remains common in many parts of the world. Public health campaigns ‘beyond the West’ tend to stress that spitting in public spreads diseases and is also, in essence, disgusting, uncivilized and deviant. After considering the evidence for such public health concerns, we draw on research carried out in China and India to argue that public spitting is experienced by many in those countries as unproblematic and that anti-spitting campaigns often represent misguided ideas of the ‘civilizing process’ transposed from the global North. This chapter frames opposition to spitting through ‘disruptive cosmopolitanism’ and ‘inverted cultural relativism’ where indigenous elites, in Eliasian fashion, look beyond their own cultural mores to contrasting Western sensibilities and seek to impose them on their own people.
This article explores qualitative research methods that employ materiality and movement, images and body mapping to access research participant knowledges. We examine a methodologies workshop that we co-facilitated for academics and... more
This article explores qualitative research methods that employ materiality and movement, images and body mapping to access research participant knowledges. We examine a methodologies workshop that we co-facilitated for academics and postgraduates. We position the workshop as a research assemblage, through which we facilitated four different methodological ‘moves’, to borrow from Barad's (2007) notion of ‘cuts’, to invite learning-knowing through the movement of affect. These embodied methodologies included: moving-writing sport, digital photovoice, movement improvisation, and body mapping somatic movement. Workshop participants were invited to experiment with each method as a means of engaging with tacit, or difficult to articulate knowledges. By exploring what these embodied ‘moves’ do to our ways of knowing, we traced the affective relations that entangle human and nonhuman worlds, self and others, researcher and researched through the workshop intra-actions. Our accounts of e...
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In this chapter Pavlidis argues that roller derby acts as a floating signifier for feminism. As a contact sport played on roller skates, roller derby is challenging feminine norms in sport and providing diverse women with opportunities to... more
In this chapter Pavlidis argues that roller derby acts as a floating signifier for feminism. As a contact sport played on roller skates, roller derby is challenging feminine norms in sport and providing diverse women with opportunities to experience their bodies in new and exciting ways. In China roller derby has been introduced by ex-patriot and development workers as a form of feminist intervention. In this particular national context roller derby signifies an embodied protest and challenge, and in doing has become a postfeminist emblem of power, strength and courage. Drawing on interviews with roller derby skaters in China and ethnographic data, Pavlidis demonstrates the possibilities and contradictions roller derby presents for culturally and ethnically diverse women.
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Given the rising global use of corporate social responsibility (CSR) by professional sport organisations, this paper acts to consolidate the state of scholarly research using a systematic quantitat...
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Introduction: Bubbles and Sport The ephemeral materiality of bubbles – beautiful, spectacular, and distracting but ultimately fragile – when applied to protect or conserve in the interests of sport-media profit, creates conditions that... more
Introduction: Bubbles and Sport The ephemeral materiality of bubbles – beautiful, spectacular, and distracting but ultimately fragile – when applied to protect or conserve in the interests of sport-media profit, creates conditions that exacerbate existing inequalities in sport and society. Bubbles are usually something to watch, admire, and chase after in their brief yet shiny lives. There is supposed to be, technically, nothing inside them other than one or more gasses, and yet we constantly refer to people and objects being inside bubbles. The metaphor of the bubble has been used to describe the life of celebrities, politicians in purpose-built capital cities like Canberra, and even leftist, environmentally activist urban dwellers. The metaphorical and material qualities of bubbles are aligned—they cannot be easily captured and are liable to change at any time. In this article we address the metaphorical sporting bubble, which is often evoked in describing life in professional spo...
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This chapter explores how the “affective turn” within feminist theory has shaped new ways of thinking about gendered power relations, subjectivities and embodied sport experiences. Scholarship on affect and emotion has advanced theorizing... more
This chapter explores how the “affective turn” within feminist theory has shaped new ways of thinking about gendered power relations, subjectivities and embodied sport experiences. Scholarship on affect and emotion has advanced theorizing of embodied movement and meaning to enable more complex understandings of the entanglement of material, visceral, discursive dimensions of gendered subjectivities. Sport and leisure more broadly can be theorized as affective practices that gendered bodies enact as they move in relation to other human and non-human bodies, objects, surfaces, etc. Drawing on examples from roller derby in Australia and the This Girl Can campaign in the United Kingdom, we demonstrate how feminist theories of affect can be applied in nuanced ways to identify inequities in women’s sport.
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ABSTRACT In this article we draw on our varied experiences of conducting feminist sport and leisure scholarship in digital spaces to offer some reflections, learnings and ways forward for navigating the challenges of digital and social... more
ABSTRACT In this article we draw on our varied experiences of conducting feminist sport and leisure scholarship in digital spaces to offer some reflections, learnings and ways forward for navigating the challenges of digital and social media research. The paper outlines our methodological and ethical relationships to doing feminist research with and about women and girls, taking Margaret McClaren’s activist lens as a starting point to consider issues of positionality and reflexivity when researching lived experiences of gender in digital spaces. We then analyse our own actions across four dimensions of the research process: (1) connecting with communities and participants, (2) conceptualising and managing data, (3) navigating the ethics of representation and (4) vulnerabilities and self-care. In sharing our learnings from a range of projects, this paper offers insights into the methodological implications of conducting digital research on the moving body, as well as practical considerations for those doing feminist research on sporting and physical cultures in digital spaces. This article contributes to emerging conversations amongst qualitative sport and physical activity researchers about the challenges of digitisation for feminist engagements with power, context and situated knowledges.
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In this article, we argue that the “turn to affect” can provide a generative framework for working through key sticking points for women in sport. Through an analysis of the rule changes and subsequent social media comments in the lead-up... more
In this article, we argue that the “turn to affect” can provide a generative framework for working through key sticking points for women in sport. Through an analysis of the rule changes and subsequent social media comments in the lead-up to the inaugural Australian Football League Women’s (AFLW) competition, we demonstrate the power of emotions for intensifying and resisting discussion about women’s participation in male-dominated sport, as they accumulate through fan encounters on social media. Through a focus on the expression of emotions such as disappointment and contempt, we interrogate the collective workings of digital affects for constituting gendered knowledge production and subjectivity in sport contexts. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of feminist thinking for sport research and practice.
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Feminism and a Vital Politics of Depression and Recovery is a conceptual and methodological intervention into the discursive construction of gender and illness. The book is much needed, beautifully...
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Blended learning and flipped classroom models are increasingly encouraged in higher education, where notions of flexibility and technological development inform institutional systems and strategies. This article presents results from an... more
Blended learning and flipped classroom models are increasingly encouraged in higher education, where notions of flexibility and technological development inform institutional systems and strategies. This article presents results from an Australian study on redesigning and delivering an introductory sociology course using a combination of such models. Four central elements of the redesign are highlighted: overall course format; use of mini-lectures; face-to-face activities; and our assessment model. We present analysis of students’ and instructors’ understandings and experiences of the redesign over three course iterations to offer insight into the unfolding and responsive dynamics involved in implementing blended and flipped models. We aim to contribute to the ongoing implementation of similar models in the context of changing institutional environments and expectations, as well as to broader projects for pedagogical enrichment in sociology.
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This article adds to a growing body of literature that engages with failure as a way of knowing and understanding the social. Through a focus on images of sportswomen’s loss or failure in three Australian newspapers during the 2018 Gold... more
This article adds to a growing body of literature that engages with failure as a way of knowing and understanding the social. Through a focus on images of sportswomen’s loss or failure in three Australian newspapers during the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games we analyzed affective-discourses and patterns in images and accompanying headlines, captions and stories to explore the place of loss in the narrative of mainstream sport reporting. Through this focus on loss we hoped to find points of disruption that might generate new conceptions of women in sport. What we found was that stories of loss in mainstream newspaper coverage reproduced transphobic, racist, nationalistic, ageist and sexist discourses. We conclude by calling for research that explores how athletes self-present their losses in digital platforms subjectively rather than being reported ‘on’.
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Abstract As women enter into spheres of production and consumption previously considered ‘masculine’, there is an opportunity to question the emotions and affects in circulation and what these ‘do’ to support the transformation of social... more
Abstract As women enter into spheres of production and consumption previously considered ‘masculine’, there is an opportunity to question the emotions and affects in circulation and what these ‘do’ to support the transformation of social life. The entree of women into the world of professional contact sport is one site where these emotions and affects are intensified. These sports, once the bastion of male dominance and control, are being opened up to women, but on precarious terms. Drawing on interviews with 13 women Australian Football League players, this article focuses in on positivity, happiness and gratitude as concepts that illuminate both the impossible cruelty of women's full inclusion in the sport-industry complex, and, more importantly, the ways women's inclusion is challenging and shifting the practices and organisation of sport.
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In this article we analyze images of sportswomen from four media outlets over the course of the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games in Australia. Through visual discourse analysis we find that despite structural changes to increase gender... more
In this article we analyze images of sportswomen from four media outlets over the course of the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games in Australia. Through visual discourse analysis we find that despite structural changes to increase gender equality at the Commonwealth Games—which for the first time ensured equal opportunities for men and women to win medals—sportswomen were still depicted in a very narrow way, and intersectional representations were mainly excluded. Though the quantity of images of women had increased, the ‘quality’ of these images was poor in terms of representing sportswomen in their diversity. We still have far to go if we are to embrace women in their multiplicity—and to recognize that women can be strong, capable, butch, femme, and varied in their range of expressions of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity.
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Abstract Skateboarding has emerged from an alternative subculture to an influential action sport, boosted by recent inclusion in the Olympic Games. Central to debates in both academic and practice communities are the tensions between... more
Abstract Skateboarding has emerged from an alternative subculture to an influential action sport, boosted by recent inclusion in the Olympic Games. Central to debates in both academic and practice communities are the tensions between skateboarding as a lifestyle and ethos, and skateboarding as an Olympic discipline. This article presents a thematic analysis of The Bones Brigade documentary which follows the rise of Tony Hawk, a high profile skateboarder, and the team he skated with during an important historical era in skating. All are men, presenting an opportunity to investigate masculinity in the sport. We reveal how these pivotal figures embody flexible and overlapping formations of hyper to alternative masculinity. Importantly, we also highlight forms of emotional connection and expressiveness that can unify all skaters. Such insights promote a deeper understanding into diverse formations of masculinity and various expressions of identities in skateboarding and with insights for other action sports.
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Abstract This article examines Australian women’s complex relationship with the beach through a focus on affect and on what bodies do. Interviews with ten participants of diverse backgrounds and of different ages reveal that women... more
Abstract This article examines Australian women’s complex relationship with the beach through a focus on affect and on what bodies do. Interviews with ten participants of diverse backgrounds and of different ages reveal that women understand the beach as a mediated and surveilled space where their bodies are foregrounded. In this environment, there is an intersection of women’s knowledge of the popular constructions of the archetypal Australian beach body, real women’s bodies, and interviewees’ experiences of the beach as a place of shame and pride. As a means of managing this affective landscape participants detail a range of bodily strategies enacted prior to going to the beach and once at the beach. This bodily labour demonstrates that for Australian women the beach is a dynamic and complicated site of both leisure and labour.
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ABSTRACT Internationally, there has been a significant increase in the numbers of young people choosing not to drink alcohol. This is counter to the weight of opinion that positions young people as irresponsible and as engaging in ‘risky’... more
ABSTRACT Internationally, there has been a significant increase in the numbers of young people choosing not to drink alcohol. This is counter to the weight of opinion that positions young people as irresponsible and as engaging in ‘risky’ behaviour. In this context, our article seeks to understand why young people choose not to drink alcohol. Drawing on original data from interviews conducted with young people between the ages of 18 and 29 in Finland and Australia, this article makes visible the tensions between youth cultural practices and personal decisions around alcohol consumption. We argue that this tension is at the heart of ‘soft stigma’ and it is through various ‘strategies of action’ that the young adults in the study overcame or managed the actual or potential stigma experienced. After analysing our data, we found six key ways in which participants managed the potential stigma and isolation of being a young person who does not drink: (1) selecting the right response and crowd; (2) taking the focus away from alcohol; (3) having a group or scene of non-drinkers; (4) being active and having fun; (5) understanding non-drinking as an individual choice and control; and (6) moralising alcohol consumption.
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Rachel Allison’s book, Kicking Center is one of the most comprehensive books on women and sport to come out in recent years. Based on in-depth ethnographic work, including an 11-month period “interning” with one of the Women’s... more
Rachel Allison’s book, Kicking Center is one of the most comprehensive books on women and sport to come out in recent years. Based on in-depth ethnographic work, including an 11-month period “interning” with one of the Women’s Professional Soccer teams (given the pseudonym of “Momentum”) in 2011 and interviewing players and a broad range of sport administrators.
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The spread of contemporary roller derby presents an opportunity to examine the ways sport can act as a form of feminist intervention. This article draws on a qualitative case study of a roller derby league in China, made up predominantly... more
The spread of contemporary roller derby presents an opportunity to examine the ways sport can act as a form of feminist intervention. This article draws on a qualitative case study of a roller derby league in China, made up predominantly of expatriate workers, to explore some of the possibilities roller derby presents in activating glocal forms of feminist participatory action. The globalization of sport has often been associated with colonialism and the loss of local physical cultures, together with commercialization. Roller derby provides a very different case, where, together with the spread of the game, comes a focus on gender diversity, female strength and a particular derby style of DIY (do-it-yourself) governance that may support forms of participatory action. As an exploratory study, this article points towards the potential of roller derby, and possibly other sport cultures, to support human rights activism in the Asia Pacific.
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ABSTRACT There are thousands of community museums across Australia. Their capacity varies, and viability is an issue, with many having insufficient volunteers and funding to operate. This research explores the community value offered by... more
ABSTRACT There are thousands of community museums across Australia. Their capacity varies, and viability is an issue, with many having insufficient volunteers and funding to operate. This research explores the community value offered by these organizations by examining a specific case: the introduction of a digital storytelling (DST) programme into a community museum by the volunteers. These volunteers form a community of practice, actively learning through collaboratively developing their skills. A qualitative approach was taken, using a participatory action research methodology. Applying the value-creation framework (VCF) developed by Wenger, Trayner, and de Laat (2011. Promoting and Assessing Value Creation in Communities and Networks: A Conceptual Framework. Amsterdam: Ruud de Moor Centrum) enabled an analysis of value through participants’ stories around introducing the DST programme. This research has implications for digital learning activities in museums, but more broadly to the value of community museums for the community, for volunteer management, and for researchers applying the VCF to other contexts where communities of practice are identified.
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The disruptive biocultural force of the coronavirus highlights the value of more-than-human perspectives for examining the gendered effects and affects on our everyday lives and leisure practices. Pursuing this line of thought our article... more
The disruptive biocultural force of the coronavirus highlights the value of more-than-human perspectives for examining the gendered effects and affects on our everyday lives and leisure practices. Pursuing this line of thought our article draws upon the insights of feminist new materialism as intellectual resource for considering what the coronavirus "does" as a gendered phenomenon. We turn to this body of feminist scholarship as it enables us to attune to what is happening, what remains unspoken and to pay attention to "the little things" that may be lost in a big crisis. Writing through the complexity of embodied affects (fear, loss, hope), we focus on the challenge to humanist notions of "agency" posed by these shifting timespace relations of home confinement, restricted movement and altered work-leisure routines. We explore the tensions arising from "home" as an historical site of gendered inequality and a new site of enhanced capacity. Thinking through the disruptive effects and affects of the coronavirus with feminist new materialism A place of confining freedom Taking a shower first cold, then warm, then too damn hot but I like it that way, just bearable. Shrinking, making smaller, contained in that hot, wet cubicle
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Despite the proliferation of doctoral training courses within universities, little attention is paid to the complexity of supervision as a process of becoming for both students and supervisors. As post-qualitative researchers we explore... more
Despite the proliferation of doctoral training courses within universities, little attention is paid to the complexity of supervision as a process of becoming for both students and supervisors. As post-qualitative researchers we explore how collaborative writing can be mobi-lised as a rhizomatic practice to open up engagements with supervision that counter hierarchical master/apprentice models of knowledge transmission. Researching-writing through our own knowledge practices and affective investments we engage with supervision as an assemblage that produces multiplicity. We created a democratic learning alliance through an electronic writing forum. These collaborative e-writing practices generated insights into, and movements through, critical moments that disrupted the doctoral experience of progress (writers block, self-doubt, misunderstanding). We theorise collaborative writing as a rhizomatic practice that refuses ontological assumptions of linearity, causality and rationali-ty, instead following the embodied lines of thought, affective intensities and problematics that haunt the supervision relationship. We recast supervision as an improvisation through which academic dilemmas/possibilities are negotiated and performed anew. Collaborative writing as rhizomatic practice: Critical moments of (un)doing doctoral supervision
Research Interests: Improvisation, Sociology of Education, Digital Humanities, Higher Education, Qualitative methodology, and 20 moreCritical Pedagogy, Recreation & Leisure Studies, Feminist Philosophy, Doctoral Supervision, Embodiment, Gilles Deleuze, Critical Posthumanism, Feminism, Qualitative Research (Education), Online Learning, Poststructuralist Feminist Theory, Affect (Cultural Theory), Supervision in doctoral education, New Materialism, Doctoral education, Physical Cultural Studies, Digital Sociology, Writing As a Method, PhD Student, and Postqualitative inquiry
Conversations with two groups of young people in Queensland were used to explore how they experience risk. The groups placed very different emphases on two types of risk – technological and embodied. The authors argue that this difference... more
Conversations with two groups of young people in Queensland were used to explore how they experience risk. The groups placed very different emphases on two types of risk – technological and embodied. The authors argue that this difference is due to each group’s position within the risk society: one group, which consisted of young people experiencing homelessness, were ‘at-risk’, while the other, a youth advisory committee, acted as a buffer between youth at-risk and risk society. These results raise the question as to how such divergences in perception can be taken into account when developing youth participation policy and procedure.
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Drawing upon insights from feminist new materialism the book traces the complex material-discursive processes through which women’s recovery from depression is enacted within a gendered biopolitics. Within the biomedical assemblage that... more
Drawing upon insights from feminist new materialism the book traces the complex material-discursive processes through which women’s recovery from depression is enacted within a gendered biopolitics. Within the biomedical assemblage that connects mental health policy, service provision, research and everyday life, the gendered context of recovery remains little understood despite the recurrence and pervasiveness of depression. Rather than reducing experience to discrete biological, psychological or sociological categories, feminist thinking moves with the biopsychosocialities implicated in both distress and lively modes of becoming well. Using a post-qualitative approach, the book creatively re-presents how women ‘do’ recovery within and beyond the normalising imperatives of biomedical and psychotherapeutic practices. By pursuing the affective movement of self through depression this inquiry goes beyond individualised models to explore the enactment of multiple self-world relations. Reconfiguring depression and recovery as bodymind matters opens up a relational ontology concerned with the entanglement of gender inequities and mental (ill) health.
Research Interests: Sociology of Sport, Social Work, Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, Mental Health, and 12 moreDepression, Women's Health, Recreation & Leisure Studies, Sociology of Mental Health & Illness, Critical Social Psychology, Affect (Cultural Theory), Women's mental health, Sociology of Health and Illness, New Materialism, Karen Barad, Recovery, and Feminist new materialism
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Sociology of Sport, Gender Studies, Cultural Sociology, Feminist Theory, and 17 moreSociology of Emotion, Subjectivities, Recreation & Leisure Studies, Embodiment, Sports Management, Gilles Deleuze, Feminism, Structuralism/Post-Structuralism, Gender and Sport, Affect Theory, Postfeminism, Affect (Cultural Theory), Women and Gender Studies, Roller Derby, Physical Cultural Studies, Lifestyle Sport, and Post-Qualitative Research
Those who play sport below elite level were largely rendered immobile and prevented from participating in their preferred forms of physical culture during the Covid-19 pandemic (with consequent negative effects on their physical and... more
Those who play sport below elite level were largely rendered immobile and prevented from participating in their preferred forms of physical culture during the Covid-19 pandemic (with consequent negative effects on their physical and mental health). Many elite sportspeople (predominantly men) were privileged, though, in being allowed to cross state and even international borders to practise and play. However, this concession was not an unmitigated boon for sport’s labour force. Athletes (some with their families), coaches and others, including high-level executives and managers, found themselves trapped in a bubble without cheering spectators or ways of escape, but with journalists and cameraphone-armed members of the public poised to spring them should they transgress. Often accused of ‘living in a bubble’ disconnected from ‘the real world’ of chores and rules, these professional sportspeople found that the Covid-19 crisis created a new bubble logic premised not on their protection from fellow citizens, but on the risk of viral contagion that these sport-workers posed to their hosts. Vacuum-sealed and heavily policed, the bubble began to resemble a prison rather than a sanctuary. This article interrogates the Australian ‘sporting bubble’, especially in Queensland, “the nation's sporting hub”, and the influence of the media sports cultural complex on government policies and their application. In doing so, we argue that the ephemeral materiality of bubbles – beautiful, spectacular, and distracting but prone to burst – creates the conditions for exacerbating inequality, granting even greater power to media corporations and reinforcing gender-based inequality within an already-sloping sport and societal field.