Stable and destabilised states of subjective well-being: dance and movement as catalysts of transition

Neoliberal and pandemic subjectivation processes: Clapping and singing as affective (re)actions during the Covid-19 home confinement

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the restriction of free movement and the sheltering-in-place became worldwide strategies to manage the virus spread. Especially at the beginning of the pandemic, community-based affective events helped people feel less isolated and support each other. In this manuscript, we explore how two of these social practices—clapping and singing—were useful to counter the emotions entailed in the subjectivation processes that accompanied the pandemic. We then argue that, seen as affective happenings, singing and clapping heightened emotions and affects that were already implicit in neoliberalism, mainly anxiety, loneliness, and a sense of precariousness, disposability, and inadequacy. On one hand, singing and clapping were liberatory practices of solidarity and resistance against the changes induced by the pandemic and its biopolitics. On the other hand, they contributed to the primary narratives on social resilience, docile bodies, and biopolitics that informed the crisis management. Singing and clapping also operated as neoliberal technologies of the self by bringing the focus on individual agency, behavioral control, and the sacrifice of specific subjects (e.g., the healthcare workers described as heroes). In short, singing and clapping were affective happenings that instantiated an entanglement of subjectivation practices in which the power to affect and the power to resist coincided.

The aesthetic, artistic and creative contributions of dance for health and wellbeing across the lifecourse: a systematic review

PURPOSE

This review articulates current understanding of the aesthetic, artistic and creative contributions that Dance makes to Health and Wellbeing across the lifecourse within publications 2000-2019, an under-researched area.

METHODS

Review Questions: What are the aesthetic, artistic and creative contributions that Dance makes to Health and Wellbeing across the lifecourse? And what methodologies are appropriate for investigating these contributions? A database keyword search identified 769 articles and 91 evaluations. 109 documents were identified for further in-depth analysis and rating, resulting in 24 papers (11 articles, 3 PhD studies, 10 evaluation reports), which were thematically analysed.

RESULTS

Findings offer seven interrelated contributions that Dance makes to Health and Wellbeing: embodiment, identity, belonging, self-worth, aesthetics, affective responses and creativity. There was less insight regarding different methodologies, and discussions focused on quantitative data's limitations. There were insights into inclusion of embodied voices, subjective accounts, and lived experiences.

CONCLUSION

Whilst acknowledging challenges, this paper illuminates the key contributions of dance to arts and health. It provides a future conceptual research agenda (prioritizing identity and creativity) and associated methodological developments. It recommends expanding geographical/lifecourse research, better defining terms, fuller epistemological critiques to open space for new methodologies, and continued attendance to appropriate rigour criteria.

A fragmented sense of home: Reconfiguring therapeutic coastal encounters in Covid-19 times

A growing body of research suggests positive links between coastal proximity, interaction, human health and wellbeing. In 2020, following the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, many people in the UK could not engage in their usual coastal practices due to a national lockdown and associated restrictions, including government bans in entering the sea. This paper shares findings from an exploratory study examining how these restrictions shaped the recreational coastal practices, perceptions and emotions of residents in the case study region of Devon, South West England. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of 12 residents, with varying domestic and employment circumstances in the pandemic. We foreground three key themes identified through an inductive thematic analysis of the interviews: feeling 'at home' with the sea, experiencing a fragmented sense of home with Covid-19, and reconfiguring the coast as a therapeutic landscape. While important to understand the links between coastal proximity, health and wellbeing, we highlight the value of gaining more nuanced insights into the emotional, social, material and temporal dynamics that can re-shape the therapeutic potential of coastal encounter in the largely unprecedented situation of a global pandemic.

A(nother) time for nature? Situating non-human nature experiences within the emotional transitions of sight loss

Sight impairment is experienced by approximately 253 million people worldwide, including people of all generations, at all life course stages. Caught between past and present embodiments of the world, people often express feelings of loss with the onset of sight impairment. This paper examines the role of nonhuman nature encounters as a contingent resource amongst individuals navigating these emotional transitions. It responds to recent calls to attend to the life course in both critical disability studies and the growing body of work linking nonhuman nature relations to human wellbeing. The paper draws on findings from a qualitative study that combined in-depth narrative interviews with in situ go-along interviews to explore how 31 people with sight impairment in England describe and experience a sense of wellbeing (or otherwise) with nature across their everyday lives and life trajectories. The data were analysed using inductive narrative thematic analysis. While nonhuman nature encounters were valued by many participants in promoting a sense of freedom, relatedness, pleasurable sensory immersion, opportunities for exploration and 'skilling up', this paper cautions against generalised or overly Romantic tropes of what nonhuman nature can 'do' through key sight loss junctures, and for whom. It highlights the value of providing timely and sensitive social scaffolding and nurturing creativity to open up meaningful opportunities to engage with nonhuman nature and to counter feelings of loss exacerbated by identity-limiting life course narratives and disability stereotypes. Informed by the stories shared by participants to chart and situate their experiences of sight loss, we call for a new identity politics within and beyond the growing movement to 'connect' people to nonhuman nature for wellbeing; a politics that affirms diverse forms of more-than-human embodiment, recognising how and why such relations may weave into - and indeed out of - people's varied, interdependent life course trajectories.

'Whole onflow', the productive event: an articulation through health

In this paper we develop an understanding of 'whole onflow'. Extending philosopher Ralph Pred's original descriptions in materialist directions consistent with posthumanist and non-representational theory, we treat whole onflow as the progressing moment ever-materializing; as a never-ending more-than-human event happening everywhere that is existed in, registered, malleable and productive. In particular, using examples in health, we describe whole onflow's core qualities that lend it, as a vital forceful becoming, its productive capacities. We argue that whole onflow offers compelling ways of understanding the processual origins of health and many productions besides in all their diversity. Moreover, we argue that it offers ways of understanding how humans figure as part of the Universe's becoming.

Being Well Together: Individual Subjective and Community Wellbeing

This paper explores the ways in which community wellbeing is, and could be, related to individual subjective wellbeing by mapping current practice, teasing out the assumptions underlying a dominant approach and flagging neglected issues. The notion of community is widely understood as about something more than the sum of the parts. Capturing subjective aspects of local life that are not simply individual but reflect the ways in which people feel and are well together is a challenging undertaking. Most existing frameworks for assessing community wellbeing are premised on a theory of the self as an autonomous, rational and independently acting or feeling individual, and the primary interest is on how community aspects of life impact on individual subjective wellbeing. This dominant approach consistently neglects spatial and social inequalities, multiple settings and scales and temporal choices and legacies, all of which constitute important political dimensions to community wellbeing. Social theories of the self as relational put relations as prior to subjectivity and as such afford ways to conceptualise community wellbeing in terms of being well together. A relational approach can also offer routes to tackling the complex interactions of inequality, scale and time. Such an approach is not, however, easily translated into quantitative measures or simple policy interventions. The approach taken to community wellbeing is not a technological issue but a political choice.

Using micro-geography to understand the realisation of wellbeing: A qualitative GIS study of three social enterprises

Social enterprises are promoted as a method of welfare reform, to transition people out of disadvantage by addressing poverty, unfulfilled capabilities and social exclusion. This study explores how three Work Integration Social Enterprises (WISEs) in Australia help to realise wellbeing for their employees by mapping their micro-geographical experience of wellbeing. By mapping the sites within a social enterprise where wellbeing is realised, we provide a practical, empirical and replicable methodology that is useful for gaining insights into where and how wellbeing realisation occurs. This situates wellbeing as an upstream place-based resource likely to influence downstream health outcomes.

Towards a caring practice: reflections on the processes and components of arts-health practice

Background: Many arts and health studies have focused on evaluating the impact of participatory arts activities, but few have considered the processes and components shaping the wellbeing outcomes of the participants. This paper uses a relational approach to health to explore the elements at play in participatory arts.Methods: The study uses an action-research case study of a 12-week visual art programme in a nursing home with 10 participants. Data collected were analysed and interpreted using grounded theory to obtain general themes and to facilitate focused analysis.Results: The study identifies the participants, wellbeing outcomes, the environment and the quality of activities as key concerns of arts-health practice. It also reflects on the link between caring and arts-health practice to highlight several caring attributes that promote a caring arts-health practice.Conclusions: The study findings provide a practice framework that can guide decision making and action to foster a caring arts-health practice.

Arts, health & wellbeing: reflections on a national seminar series and building a UK research network

An account is provided of a UK national seminar series on Arts, Health and Wellbeing funded by the Economic and Social Research Council during 2012–13. Four seminars were organised addressing current issues and challenges facing the field. Details of the programme and its outputs are available online. A central concern of the seminar programme was to provide a foundation for creating a UK national network for researchers in the field to help promote evidence-based policy and practice. With funding from Lankelly Chase Foundation, and the support of the Royal Society for Public Health, a Special interest Group for Arts, Health and Wellbeing was launched in 2015.

Geographical thinking in nursing inquiry, part two: performance, possibility, and non-representational theory

Part one in this two paper series reviewed the nature of geographical thinking in nursing research thus far. The current paper builds on it by looking forwards and providing a particular vision for future research. It argues that it is time to once again look to the parent discipline of human geography for inspiration, specifically to its turn towards non-representational theory, involving an emphasis on life that onflows prior to meaning, significance, and full cognition; on life's 'taking-place'. The paper introduces this way of viewing and animating the world. Some potential connections to nursing research and practice are suggested, as are some specific avenues for future inquiry. Explained is how, through non-representational theory, nursing might be re-imagined as something that reveals space-time.