Becoming enwinded: A new materialist take on smoking pleasure

Coronavirus, capitalism and a 'thousand tiny dis/advantages': a more-than-human analysis

This paper establishes a relational, post-anthropocentric and materialist approach to the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic. Analysis of the 'pandemic assemblage' reveals that the virus has subverted the social and economic relations of capitalism, enabling its global spread. This insight establishes a materialist framework for exploring socio-economic disparities in Covid-19 incidence and death rates, via a more-than-human and monist analysis of capitalist production and markets. Disparities derive from the 'thousand tiny dis/advantages' produced by people's daily interactions with human and non-human matter, making sense of the unequal occupational patterning of coronavirus incidence. This more-than-human approach supplies a critical alternative to the mainstream public health and scientific perspectives on the pandemic, with important implications for current and future policy to counter future microbiological outbreaks.

The eating disorder recovery assemblage: Collectively generating possibilities for eating disorder recovery

In this paper, we explore the affective-discursive-material aspects of the supportive eating disorder recovery assemblage. We approach recovery as an “assemblage” to facilitate an understanding of how human (people, systems of care, etc.) and nonhuman (affect, discourses, etc.) forces generate possibilities or impossibilities for recovery. Moving away from framings of recovery as an individual achievement, we consider the relationality and dynamism of eating disorder recovery in interviews with 20 people in recovery and 14 supporters of people in recovery. We draw from experiential accounts to theorize a supportive eating disorder recovery assemblage in relation to trust and love mobilized in interactions and relationships. This supportive eating disorder recovery assemblage can scaffold new understandings of recoveries as multiple and co-produced. Supportive eating disorder recovery assemblages generate improvisational spaces, albeit loosely contained and bounded, for different pathways to and manifestations of “recoveries”. This work builds on a body of feminist scholarship on eating disorders/disordered eating that takes up gendered relationships of power in treatment settings, extending toward and analysing material, affective, embodied, and potentially affirming dimensions of care and emotion in participants’ lives.

Toward a More-Than-Human Analysis of Digital Health: Inspirations From Feminist New Materialism

New feminist materialism theories potentially offer a foundation for innovative ways to research health-related experiences from a more-than-human perspective. Thus far, however, few researchers have taken up this more-than-human and post-qualitative approach to investigate health topics. In this article, I outline some approaches I have developed. I begin with a brief overview of the central tenets of new feminist materialism scholarship and a discussion of some empirical studies where these perspectives have been employed to address health topics. I then list some key propositions, research questions, and things to think with from the feminist materialism literature that I have put to work as a basis for conducting empirical research and analyzing data. Then follows four examples drawn from my research on digital health, providing instances of how qualitative researchers can take up this approach and what insights can be generated from entering into this kind of "research assemblage."