Adele 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. Supervisors: Simone Fullagar
As an emerging researcher working in the field of leisure studies, I explore auto/ethnographic wr... 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.
This article narrates the affects and experiences of the CaiRollers, the first and only roller de... 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.
Despite the proliferation of doctoral training courses within universities, little attention is p... 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, ...
Feminism and a Vital Politics of Depression and Recovery, 2019
In this chapter we examine women’s creative practices through everyday ‘cultural making’ that rec... 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.
Feminism and a Vital Politics of Depression and Recovery, 2019
Promoting habits of coping through cognitive behaviour therapy has become a standard policy respo... 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).
This chapter explores the everyday habits and rhythms of embodied movement that produce different... 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.
Feminism and a Vital Politics of Depression and Recovery, 2019
This chapter explores the visceral materiality of the knot to think through the rhizomatic moveme... 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.
This article investigates how safety is experienced, navigated and cultivated by women on Instagr... more 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...
The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South
Largely taboo in ‘Westernized’ nations, spitting in public remains common in many parts of the wo... 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 a... 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...
As an emerging researcher working in the field of leisure studies, I explore auto/ethnographic wr... 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.
This article narrates the affects and experiences of the CaiRollers, the first and only roller de... 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.
Despite the proliferation of doctoral training courses within universities, little attention is p... 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, ...
Feminism and a Vital Politics of Depression and Recovery, 2019
In this chapter we examine women’s creative practices through everyday ‘cultural making’ that rec... 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.
Feminism and a Vital Politics of Depression and Recovery, 2019
Promoting habits of coping through cognitive behaviour therapy has become a standard policy respo... 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).
This chapter explores the everyday habits and rhythms of embodied movement that produce different... 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.
Feminism and a Vital Politics of Depression and Recovery, 2019
This chapter explores the visceral materiality of the knot to think through the rhizomatic moveme... 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.
This article investigates how safety is experienced, navigated and cultivated by women on Instagr... more 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...
The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South
Largely taboo in ‘Westernized’ nations, spitting in public remains common in many parts of the wo... 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 a... 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...
Drawing upon insights from feminist new materialism the book traces the complex material-discursi... 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.
Those who play sport below elite level were largely rendered immobile and prevented from particip... 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.
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