Suchergebnisse

Articulating the complexities of relational wellbeing can be challenging at the best of times, and even more complex during periods of heightened stress and uncertainty. Taking inspiration from feminist materialisms and recent writings on material methods, we explore the potential of object interviews to reveal the material-discursive dimensions of women's experiences of wellbeing during the pandemic. In this paper we describe our research process conducting object interviews with 38 women living in Aotearoa New Zealand from a range of socio-economic, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds. We explore the potential and challenges of object interviews for surfacing new ways of knowing (theoretically, methodologically, and cross-culturally) wellbeing beyond human-oriented health, medical and social-constructionist models, and towards more multidimensional and relational understandings. This paper offers our reflections and learnings about the process of re-turning object interviews and the potential of such approaches for evoking complex ways of knowing wellbeing during and beyond pandemic times.

Building upon and extending a growing strand of research engaging feminist new materialisms to understand women's moving bodies as more-than-human phenomena, this paper considers the pandemic as an event that initiated new expressions and contents for the fitness assemblage. Engaging a feminist reading of Deleuze and Guattari's writings on becoming, we examine women's physical activity practices during the coronavirus pandemic. Drawing upon object interviews with 38 women living in Aotearoa New Zealand, we ask: How do women's pandemic relations with spaces (home, neighborhood), others (family, pets) and matter (objects of fitness) prompt new ways of knowing their own moving bodies and the importance of physical activity in their lives? Through our affective, material, and embodied analysis, we explain how the pandemic event surfaced new lines of flight away from the dominant gendered fitness assemblage. Women's affective relations and movement encounters prompted the emergence of new forms of bodily autonomy and fitness for pleasure and connection, offering glimpses of alternative ways of knowing, feeling, and sensing physical activity as becoming.