Relational Ethics of Care in Pandemic Research: Vulnerabilities, Intimacies, and Becoming Together-Apart

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. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Qualitative Inquiry is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Reconceptualizing women's wellbeing during the pandemic: Sport, fitness and more-than-human connection

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. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Sport, Physical Culture, and New Materialisms

The physical, material body and its associations have taken primacy during these extraordinary times. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, legions of public health officials, pharma-entrepreneurs, and political intermediaries from around the world have fixed their complexes upon the living body and its varying scales of inter-relatedness. As the global pandemic has evolved, the body has been increasingly rendered visible, quantifiable, relational, traceable, transmissive, vulnerable, and abject. The pandemic body - rife with biological and onto-epistemological contingencies - has been thrust into a paradoxical state of fixity and uncertainty. It is the site of individuated fixation - made into object of (bio)political inquiry and control;at once a complex node of communitas and immunitas. It has been surveilled and technologized in increments of six-foot spacings, single-unit mask adornments, and 95% success rates. However, amidst such COVID-spawned 'body shocks', as Margrit Shildrick (2019) might suggest, the frames by which we as scientists and philosophers have come to know the body, and to embody that knowledge, have very much been unsettled (see Thorpe, Brice, & Clark 2021). The pandemic has forced us to rethink the relatedness of the body - to other bodies, to vulnerable bodies, to the population as a whole, to particulate matter, to the state and its medical-industrial-complexes. We have been forced to reimagine how bodies move, how movement is relative, how we breath, and where we can stand or walk or travel or live.

“We seek those moments of togetherness”: digital intimacies, virtual touch and becoming community in pandemic times

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. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Feminist Media Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Reconceptualizing Women's Wellbeing During the Pandemic: Sport, Fitness and More-Than-Human Connection

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. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Journal of Sport & Social Issues is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)