Are you an Animal Crossings fan? Meg at the Vitalities Lab is now looking for Animal Crossing players to participate in an in-game interview, to learn more about their experience of playing the game while social distancing in 2020.
Image description: Meg on her island in Halloween dress with her villager, Gigi, who is a purple frog
Here are the details:
My Happy Place: Exploring the use of ‘Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ during ‘Social Distancing’ (Ethics Approval HC200424)
What does the interview involve?
Meg will visit your Animal Crossing island in-game, while talking to you over Zoom or the Nintendo Online app! You can show her all your favourite places, characters and if you like, swap items! It will only take 60 mins and should be lots of fun.
Image description: Meg in Halloween dress and a villager, Pate, who is a blue duck.
Who can participate?
You must be:
18 years or older
A fan of Animal Crossing who has played the game this year while social distancing
Speak English
Be located in Australia, America, Canada or Europe (if you are a university student studying in these countries but are in your home country right now, you’re also welcome!)
Image description: Meg on her island celebrating Halloween with a villager, Soleil, who is an orange hamster.
How can I participate?
Contact Meg at the below email address- questions are also welcome! Please contact the following person via email to register your interest in taking part in the research:
It’s becoming more common to hear about social media ‘fasts’, digital detoxes, as well as media consumption practices understood in terms of digital ‘calories’, nutrition and diets. The language of health, wellness and the diet industry has well and truly spread to how we talk about social media, as well as other technologies like smartphones and video games devices.
The 5:2 Digital Diet, for example, models itself on the popular 5:2 fasting diet, and recommends that we abstain from screens two days a week. Devotees are instructed to ‘delete all email and social media apps from your phone Friday night and reinstall Sunday morning.’ It’s also recommended that you fill your screen-free days with exercise and ‘getting out into nature’, which is ‘proven to help with all sorts of ailments’. It’s clear that there is an emphasis on wellness here that mirrors food-based diets and lifestyle programs.
Ah yes, the relaxing beauty of nature
Notably social media, and technology in general, is often positioned as the evil opposite of nature. Nature is largely framed simplistically as space of retreat and repair, for humans and from humans. This narrative, of course, misses the complex politics surrounding what in fact constitutes ‘natural’ and the ways outdoor spaces are accessible more often to the privileged. Even more hypocritical, this relatively recent ‘return to nature’ neglects the histories of many Indigenous peoples: colonists’ racist actions and dispossession of land were predicated on the supremacist assumption that a connection to nature made Indigenous people less-human.
Beyond detoxing and fasting, others advocate for more ‘nutritionally’ focused approach to digital technologies and social media. We might think about this as akin to a ‘balanced’ diet and focused more on well being, and less on purity and abstinence. However, focusing on the ‘nutrition’ or ‘quality’ of digital content is highly subjective, and fails to challenge the underlying problems with this ‘social media diet’ mentality. This kind of language is reminiscent of the kind of shame and moralism that surrounds ‘unhealthy’ and ‘junk’ foods. The problem that gets left out of conversations about our anxieties around social media use and our anxieties about food — what about pleasure?
On this question, it’s useful to turn to the excellent work of Professor Helen Keane who wrote the highly influential book What’s Wrong With Addiction?. She draws out the entangled relationship between anxieties about pleasure and the popularisation of addiction as a concept. She writes that ‘[d]esire, discipline and pleasure are appropriated into an economy of health and disease’ (p. 18). When we think about social media, we can see exactly what Helen is talking about. The fact that social media is appealing quickly becomes mobilised as proof of its unhealthiness, its need to be managed by medical professionals and its ‘addictive’ qualities.
On Monday night’s episode of ABC’s Q & A, panelists discussed ‘the consequences of our growing dependence on social media’, with some arguing that the addictive nature of social media platforms has now reached crisis point. The negative mental health effects of social media were largely taken for granted, despite existing research on social media’s impact on well being and mental health being far from conclusive. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that social media impacts are both positive and negative (and many studies that reveal more nuanced effects). Beyond the limited framing of wellbeing there is a rich literature exploring digital cultures and communities on various platforms.
The show also participated in much of the same kind of shaming that goes on for those who consume too much of the wrong thing – even if often when it comes to social media consumption the shaming is usually directed at oneself. There are interesting parallels too with other addictive substances – junk food or illicit drugs – whereby the ‘addict’ is painted as morally deficient and lacking ‘willpower’.
‘Popular addiction discourse constructs everyday substances and experiences as potentially dangerous, and sees risk, dysfunction and disorder everywhere.’
Helen Keane, What’s Wrong With Addiction? (p. 27)
So let’s get back to the original question — is social media like food? In many ways I think the comparison is apt but not for the reasons many are suggesting. Like food, social media consumption is embedded in socio-cultural meanings. I don’t think there is anything intrinsically more wholesome about sharing deep inner feelings with a friend compared with smashing a game of Candy Crush. But certainly our shared social norms may identify one practice as connection and another as addiction.
Now after all this typing I guess I’m out of digital calories…better do a run around the block so I can check my email.
As the COVID-19 pandemic has spread globally, our experiences of it have shifted over time since initial reports of the virus hit the headlines in January. These temporal shifts can be subtle, almost negligible, or more confronting. Yet even when they are more noticeable, it can be hard to orient yourself to how the pandemic felt only weeks earlier. Things feel so slippery in the ‘time of Corona’.
When the COVID-19 pandemic began to be ‘felt’ throughout Australia, Katrine (one of the authors of this blog post), was visiting the Vitalities Lab from Denmark and had to return home suddenly — only two weeks into a planned four-week trip. The rest of us, despite living in the same area of Sydney, were also distanced as local movement restrictions set in and we became confined to our homes. Now, six months later, the pandemic continues to unfold locally as well as globally in unpredictable ways. We continue to live with and navigate new waves of infections and changing social restrictions that impact our work and the ways we connect and collaborate with others.
Katrine’s sudden departure was jarring, a moment that marked the beginning of a rapidly shifting timeline. Despite — or perhaps because of — the uncertainty we all faced, we wanted to keep writing together as a way to maintain the engagement and support we found in each other as four early-career academics. Katrine initiated a collaborative document so we could share our experiences and reflections as the pandemic unfolded. All four authors wrote into a Google Doc whenever we felt like it, not distinguishing between who wrote what, not following any particular format or timeline, and each writing into the space where the previous writer had finished, regardless of the narrative thread. These contributions varied wildly, oscillating between an ‘up close and personal’ approach documenting our feelings or personal responses to the unfolding news each day as we tried to make sense of new routines, as well as more arms-length approaches to thinking through the social and political complexities of the pandemic.
Now, we realise we’ve been writing this document for more than six months and what we have is a record, of sorts, of our own COVID era(s). Yet, looking at the 9000 word document after two months of writing and sharing the odd Skype call, we recognise that what we have is much more than the chronicling of a series of specific moments, experiences and thoughts from the COVID-19 time. Rather when taken as a whole, the document reveals something about the peculiar,slightly disorienting quality of ‘COVID time’ and our experiences of it.
Others have written about the strangeness of this time and the way our perception of time has changed, with references to things that are ‘in the time of Corona’. Like ‘love in the time of corona’ or ‘trust in the time of COVID19’ or ‘cleaning in the time of coronavirus’ or ‘how to do [insert literally anything here] in the time of COVID’. There are also a growing number of memes and social media posts that point to the unusual and distorted way time seems to unfold right now; somehow both frantically accelerated and painstakingly slow at the same time. It seems we are unsettled by this unfamiliar experience of time, and are searching for ways to express and make sense of the feeling that we are living in a very specific and extraordinary time. But, even this is not quite accurate. We are not so much living in a specific period of time (because we don’t know when this time will end, and even its beginnings were somewhat murky). Rather, the quality of time has changed. Any illusion of time as linear, predictable and quantifiable, has been completely disrupted. Time now seems even more multiple, elastic and unpredictable than ever.
We often think about time as that which progresses ‘naturally’ forward at a steady pace and is broken up into predictable units (minutes, hours, days) that structure our days and lives, something that is challenged in COVID time. During the COVID-19 pandemic the hours, days, and weeks just feel different than they used to. Schools, workplaces and businesses are re-opening and closing in what feels like a haphazard trajectory. Time is neither linear or predictable nor is it associated with steady progress. Rather time is peculiar, both accelerated and slowed down, bringing both hope and despair as we realise this is far from over.
Moments that disrupt our sense of time as linear are hardly new though. While waiting in a waiting room to hear the outcome of a medical test, for example, the passage of time can seem very different to when we’re spending an enjoyable evening with friends (if we’re ever able to do that again). Indeed, this linear narrative of time has long been critiqued by Indigenous and First Nations scholars who highlight the ways that chronological ‘clock time’ has been imposed as part of violent colonising processes and indigenous ways of marking time were (and continue to be) denigrated as ‘backward’.
Throughout western history, time has also been conceptualised in alternative ways that might help us make sense of our experience of COVID time. French philosopher Henri Bergson, for instance, argued that time should not be understood quantitatively, as units that can be measured — days, hours, minutes — but rather qualitatively as what he called duration. By this Bergson means that understanding time as duration means thinking about time as a complex layering, a constant process of becoming such that it is not possible to actually capture, divide, or quantify it.
Elizabeth Freeman also imagines time as qualitative and argues that time and norms are closely connected, and that the quantification of time can have normative effects: she calls this “chrononormativity”. She argues that we expect lifespans to play out in predictable, linear (heteronormative) paths as we move through life stages — there is a ‘right time’ to commit to a monogamous relationship, a ‘right time’ to have children, a ‘right time’ to have certain types of careers, and so on. Freeman argues that the idea of the steady, linear progression of doing things at certain times is related to cultural separations between what is considered ‘normal’ from what is considered ‘deviant’ or ‘different’.
In COVID times, we see this reconfigured in ideas of the ‘right time’ to go back to work, the ‘right time’ to re-open institutions, the ‘right time’ to react to new outbreaks etc. The deep ties between ideas of time and norms for structuring life are also evident in the stress tied to the ways in which COVID time does not unfold as we ‘normally’ expect time to, with specific dates marking the ‘normal’ rhythm of going (back to), for example, school or work.
Therefore, as COVID continues to unfold in unpredictable and nonlinear ways, we are forced to confront our limited understanding and vocabulary of time. The pandemic is indeed not unfolding in a linear way. Instead, it is filled with openings, closings, going back and forths. Embracing alternative ways of thinking about time and normality may be helpful tools as we attempt to make sense of ‘Corona time’ and for alleviating the stress associated with the disruption of ‘normal’ time as we usually know it.
Spring has arrived in the southern hemisphere and we in the Vitalities Lab are welcoming the warmer weather as we continue to adjust to our work from home routines and re-imagine our research projects during the COVID pandemic. As we all work to navigate these challenging conditions, we are particularly excited to share one of our new initiatives, the ‘Breaking Methods’ YouTube Webinar Series. These slide-based webinars showcase some of the innovative social research methods we’ve adapted, designed, and engaged with and explain how we’re analysing the material these methods generate.
In these webinars we explore everything from storyboards and mapping methods, digital photo diaries and zine creation, to methods braiding and the use of TikTok and YouTube content as qualitative data. The series is designed to be accessible to students and researchers alike and we hope it offers some fresh ideas about how to keep research projects going in a time of much uncertainty.
In the meantime, we continue to work on our various social research projects (highlighted in our previous newsletter) and to engage in research activity and dialogue with colleagues in Australia and around the globe. A summary of recent publications, presentations, and other activity not mentioned above is provided below.
Academic Publications
Baker S, Buttigieg B, Cantillon Z, Pavlidis A, Rodriguez Castro L and Watson A (2020) Getting Students to ‘Do’ Introductory Sociology: Analysis of a blended and flipped interactive workshop. Journal of Sociology. Published OnlineFirst 8 July 2020 [Authorship order is alphabetical].
Clark, M. (2020). Signs, beaches, and bodies in pandemic times: A visual essay. Media International Australia, online first. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878X20949980
Lupton, D. (2020) Thinking with care about personal data profiling: a more-than-human approach. International Journal of Communication, 14, 3165-3183, available online at https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/13540
Lupton, D. and Watson, A. (2020) Towards a more-than-human digital data studies: developing research-creation methods. Qualitative Research, online first. doi:org/10.1177/1468794120939235
Lupton, D. (2020) ‘Not the real me’: social imaginaries of personal data profiling. Cultural Sociology, online first. doi.org/10.1177/1749975520939779
Lupton, D. (2020) A more-than-human approach to bioethics: the example of digital health. Bioethics, online first. doi: 10.1111/bioe.12798
Lupton, D. (2020) Special section on ‘Sociology and the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic’. Health Sociology Review, 29(2), 111-112.
Rich, E., Lewis, S., Lupton, D. and Miah, A. (2020) Digital Health Generation? Young People’s Use of ‘Healthy Lifestyle’ Technologies. Bath: University of Bath, UK. Available at Available at https://www.digitalhealthgeneration.net/final-report
Rasmussen, M.L, Southerton, C., Fela, G.. Marshall, D., Rasmussen, M.L, Cover, R., and Aggleton, P. (2020) ‘Playing recognition politics: queer theoretical reflections on LGBTQ youth social policy in Australia in the 1980s and 1990s’ Archives of Sexual Behavior, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-020-01751-6
Other Publications
Watson, A. So Fi Zineedition #7. Published August 21, 2020.
Watson, A. Into the Sea, Leiden: Brill. [Novel] Published June 4, 2020
Workshops and Presentations
In June, Marianne gave a keynote lecture to graduate students at the IT University of Copenhagen enrolled in a special course called ‘Research Interrupted’. Marianne’s talk, ‘The pandemic pivot: Re-imagining relationality and physicality in unfolding and uncertain research contexts’ addressed strategies for adapting social research during pandemic conditions.
In August , Deborah shared an overview of early findings from her project examining Australians’ experiences of COVID in a seminar hosted by the Centre for Health and Social Research (19 August 2020). She also gave the Wellness + Society plenary address at Sorbonne University, Paris in September titled ‘ COVID life narratives: a sociomaterial approach’ (4 September 2020).
Ash, Marianne and Deborah participated in the “Living In, With and Beyond the ‘Smart Home’” symposium hosted by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making in September. Marianne shared her paper co-authored with Deborah titled, ‘This is where I come to breathe’: The unexpected affects and affordances of exercising at home. Ash presented, ‘From workplaces to smart/home work spaces: Insights into the affective and requisitional presence of domestic digital technologies during COVID-19’ a paper co-authored with Deborah and Mike Michaels from the University of Exeter, UK.
Ash has also been busy with her involvement in TASA and sharing her passion for sociological fiction and zine making through the following events.
Sociological Fiction. Anthropology and Sociology Seminar Series, University of Western Australia. 28 August, 2020.
Zines for Data Justice. Ida B. Wells Data Justice Lab, Princeton University. 31 July, 2020
TASA Rapid Peer Support Session. The Australian Sociological Association. 4 June, 2020.
After the COVID-19 pandemic had changed the way many researchers live and work, I started to see a lot of questions and discussion on social media within the academic community about taking research ‘online’ because it could no longer be conducted face-to-face. This is a bit curious because we’re having these conversations on social media platforms, using smartphones and computers, connected via the internet. I have a feeling we’ve missed the whole ‘taking this online’ moment…
But I understand what people are talking about – there are lots of researchers who want to do research using digital tools or research on digital communities, now that they can’t do ‘traditional’ research IRL. COVID-19 restrictions have completely upended academic life as we know it, leaving researchers scrambling to find alternative ways to do research.
And I also understand the frustration of internet scholars who have spent years developing digital methods and theorising digital sociality only to have the platforms and technologies we’ve long invested ourselves in become a hasty stand-in to replace face-to-face methods. This can present the digital as a kind of ‘next best thing’ for physically co-present interactions and neglects the complex conditions of these communities that exist in their own right. There’s also a long history of digital interactions being unfavourably compared with face-to-face interaction, and digital social researchers have often attempted to interrogate the assumption that in-person interactions are more ‘real’.
Um yes Dad, it is hard. It’s a real job.
Perhaps we’re all a little extra sensitive because we’ve also spent years trying to convince more traditionally minded scholars (and also our parents) that our research is legitimate. I’m sure every internet scholar has had a senior colleague make us feel our research was silly. It’s been a long struggle for social media scholars to have their work taken seriously, when the more readily touchable, tangible and ‘observable’ so-called “real” world is problematically positioned as a more legitimate source of knowledge.
All this said, I don’t believe we as digital social researchers should be gatekeepers at this time. Digital methods are a complex and ever changing field. We ourselves are always learning and getting it wrong, disagreeing with each other and figuring out how to we can be better scholars. What makes digital methods so exciting is that things change so quickly, new platforms emerge and old platforms disappear – new methods have to be created and changed and adapted to keep up. There have already been some great efforts made to help each other in this space. Deborah Lupton’s crowdsourced Google Doc – Doing fieldwork in a pandemic is a rich resource that provides a fantastic place to start with so many great recommended readings from researchers who are familiar with different digital methods. At the Vitalities Lab we’ve also been making our Breaking Methods Webinar Series on YouTube and hopefully these are helpful for anyone interested in experimental and digital methods. We all have to learn to work together and help each other, especially at times like this where research is under pressure from all sides.
As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds in devastating and unpredictable ways, the use of face masks (mandated and suggested) as a means to reduce the spread of the virus has gained attention in popular, media and political discourse, evoking (often heated) debates around how effective and necessary they are, and whether mask mandates infringe on civil liberties and rights.
Recently in NSW, as we watch with empathetic anxiety as our Victorian neighbours head into unprecedented social lock down conditions, mask use is being more strongly recommended than ever with both the NSW Premier and the Prime Minister posting pictures and messages to social media, strongly urging Australians to don masks in public spaces.
Though the thrust of these debates largely focuses on whether masks do or do not ‘work’, there are also social, political and bodily dimensions of mask wearing (or not wearing) that merit attention. Over time, and in some situations, it may become an ordinary thing to wear a mask. Nevertheless the practice of wearing a mask requires some getting used to. It changes our bodily habits, takes on different meanings, and evokes physical and emotional responses from both those who choose (or are required to) wear a mask and those who choose not to.
Photo by Marianne Clark
The pushback against wearing masks is complicated. It can be connected to people feeling their individual freedoms are being infringed upon. The backlash against mandatory masks by so-called ‘anti-maskers’ has been severe, with one woman who refused to wear a mask in Melbourne this week assaulting a police officer who questioned her. This phenomenon has a long history in other public health initiatives like the introduction of seatbelts and restrictions on substances, which over time have become normalised.
Masks can also be experienced as physically uncomfortable, and not only for people with pre-existing conditions that may be impacted by the mask. Masks are worn very close to the body and given that they obscure part of the face, they alter our speech and expression and change the way we breathe. Ordinary social interaction, which often involves a lot of facial cues, must be renegotiated.
Wearing a mask also draws our attention to bodies and breath in new ways. The experience of wearing a mask can be confronting as we are suddenly up close and personal with bodily functions and performances that we don’t usually feel or see or even notice. We suddenly feel our breath materialize as condensation on our skin, we can smell it as we speak, working to project our voice through layers of fabric. The practice of breathing itself becomes more explicitly noticed and felt. At the same time, as we wear masks to contain aerosols and droplets expelled by our breath, we are reminded of the capacities of breath to move through space in unpredictable ways, to reach and touch and potentially harm others, to spread an unseen virus. Suddenly breath is equated with risk and we become preoccupied with how far it can travel, how long it lingers, how might this change when we are indoors and outdoors? When walking or running?
Masks mitigate this risk to varying degrees, depending on their design, material make-up, and context and style of usage. In order to understand how to best protect ourselves from the virus, we may find ourselves reading scientific information more abundantly and carefully, taking care to understand the details about breath and the properties of certain fibres of fabric that offer the best protection. Yet we filter this information through our embodied and lived experiences.
Thinking about breath and face masks in this context highlights the messiness and leakiness of social exchanges in new ways. We are connected with one another more deeply and intricately than we often imagine, even those we don’t know and who we do not visibly touch. COVID-19 has underlined how our bodily actions and movements, even everyday ones, can directly impact others in ways we may not have previously imagined. Our breath is capable of touching (and impacting )others, even though it is unfelt and unseen, senses we usually rely on as indicators and proof of the ‘real’. By thinking about breath and face masks in these conditions, the collective aspects of our social lives are illuminated in new ways.
Science and Technology scholar Jon Agar argues that there is an ‘inner ring’ of technologies that we hold close to our bodies, such as clothing, shoes and glasses. More recently, this inner ring has also come to include things like smartphones and wearable devices like Fitbits or smart watches. These objects become ‘domesticated’ over long periods of time and they become intimately connected with our bodies. We no longer constantly feel our clothing against our skin or our smartphone in our pocket, instead these sensations become part of our everyday sense of our bodies.
Face masks and their (contested) emergence during the pandemic offer us an opportunity to think about our intimacy with objects, given that their integration into our intimate ‘inner circle’ has been abrupt, and largely imposed. Yesterday, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian suggested we keep masks in cars and our pockets, places very familiar and deeply integrated with our daily embodied lives. Masks suddenly ‘live’ alongside other objects like smartphones that have established themselves as essential over years rather than days.
Over time they become more familiar and consequently perhaps more comfortable. Through trial and error we find masks that work for our lives; nose wire prevents glasses fogging up, patterned fabric makes us feel better about wearing them, some fabrics and elastics are softer than others, some are better suited to smaller or larger faces. Though their entrance into our lives was abrupt, the slower processes by which we come to know and become comfortable with the objects that are most intimately close with our bodies are beginning to emerge in our developing relationship with face masks.
Why has Animal Crossing: New Horizons been so popular during COVID-19 lockdown, and are the cute characters featured in the game so popular? My research at the Vitalities Lab explores this question with an ethnographic study of online Animal Crossing fandom communities and interviews with players. As a specialist in kawaii (cuteness), I’m interested in finding out how users relate to characters in game, their islands and each other through Animal Crossings’ kawaii design and interface. Emerging research has sought to capture the affective qualities of digital media, in particular its capacity to evoke feelings, experiences and decrease and increase capacities to act. In this blog post, we will be thinking about the kawaii characters that populate the world of Animal Crossing.
An image from Megan’s Animal Crossing game, showing her character (left) and a villager (right) among peach trees
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a game released for the Nintendo Switch in March 2020 when many regions across the world, such as Australia, America, Canada and Europe began to practice social distancing in response to COVID-19. The game, made in Japan (released in-country under the title Doubutsu no Mori), is designed to be kawaii in order construct a safe and playful environment for users. Players befriend and form relationships with kawaii animal ‘villagers’ who populate the game space known as an ‘island’. You may have seen in the news reports of people having weddings, meetings and dates in-game. While this has provided a fun way to connect in stressful times, I’m interested in the way in which players relate to their digital animal friends who inhabit the island.
To enhance their experience of their island, players are encouraged to bond with the local villagers. A selection of 10 villagers move in from a random selection of almost 400 unique characters. While some players don’t mind who moves in, others actively seek to curate who lives on their island through purchasing characters via amiibo trading cards, visiting friends islands where their preferred villager lives and harassing ones they find “ugly” until they move out. Typically, the more kawaii a villager the more they are sought after by players.
There’s something “magic” about the way the animal villagers pull you into a suspension of disbelief. The villagers are friendly, missing you when you don’t log in to see how they are. They go about their daily lives shopping, watering your plants, exercising and more. In other words, the villagers are designed to elicit care giving behaviours by following the same design principles as virtual pets including realistic motion, interactivity, autonomy, promotion of subjective reality and personal attachment. By following codes and algorithmic parameters, these furry little friends illustrate what Pettman (2009) has described as ‘love as technology’. Can love be created and maintained through design? The playful nature of human and more-than-human relationships in the Animal Crossing points to the potential for digital technologies to augment the subjectivities of digital objects.
An image from Megan’s Animal Crossing game, showing a villager (left) and her character (right) sitting together at night
But of course there are other appealing aspects of the game, including the customisation and curation of your personal island, the peaceful activities and pastimes you can carry out like fishing and gardening, and the ability to play with other online. I’ll be talking about these in later blogs!
Dr Megan Rose is an associated researcher at the Vitalities Lab, an adjunct associate lecturer in Sociology and Anthropology, Social Research and Policy at UNSW Sydney and a researcher at ANROWS. You can follow her Animal Crossing research via her Twitter and the Vitalities Lab blog.
The Vitalities Lab has launched a new webinar series involving short-form presentations (slides plus voice-over). These webinars are designed to be clear explanations about using innovative methods and analysing the materials generated. They can be used in undergraduate and postgraduate methods teaching or by any interested researcher.
The ‘Breaking Methods’ series can be found on YouTube here. The first four videos explain how to go about using story completion, map making, storyboards and TikTok content for social research.
You can subscribe to the channel to receive updates as we upload new webinars across a range of exciting methods.
I did not plan to write about COVID-19. There have been so many texts at this point on the different trails of destruction the pandemic will leave behind, and how it will change things forever. But then again, looking back in history, writers will probably be right. So, maybe I can at least use COVID-19 as a reminder about how other, less brutal events, work to change the ideas and practices of healthcare?
While out on a walk the other day, I was listening to show ‘The Philosophical Room’ that is airing on Swedish public radio. Being an arena for popular philosophical discussion and debate, they were touching on the subject of COVID-19. More particularly, the two invited philosophers were talking about a conflict of values that the pandemic could pose in Swedish healthcare. The main topic of the discussion was how to prioritise different patients due to the outbreak of COVID-19.
I am the first to admit that my use of COVID-19 as an example is a bit over the top. Having said that, I believe that COVID-19 really is a timely example on how the ideas and practices of healthcare are rearticulated – however often by less dramatic events. In Sweden and other countries, there are policies about what healthcare should be to individuals as well as society as a whole. Swedish healthcare, is guided by three pivotal principles on ethics.
Just like the philosophers on the show described to listeners, these are applied to assure the equality between different groups in society; aged, classed, gendered, etc. More specifically, all individual (Swedish) subjects are given equal value through these principles and thus, all patients have the legal right to get good care. What the guests on the radio show added though, was that due to the potential influx of patients because of COVID-19, what healthcare is and should be to subjects, might have to be renegotiated. Should younger people be cared for on the expense of elders? Or should doctors, based on utilitarian ideas, be saved instead of other groups that in the context of the pandemic, appear to be less important for society?
In the last decades, there has been a general move towards personalisation, individualisation and marketisation in western healthcare. Nordic welfare states like Sweden are no exceptions. However, when listening to the radio show, the forecasts of COVID-19’s effects, we are presented with a different discourse on healthcare. In the shows’ discussion, the philosophical underpinnings of healthcare were moved from an individualistic understanding of health and care, to a more collective approach – making care, health and ultimately death, more of a communal effort.
This ideological probing is not only evident among professional philosophers on radio shows, but also in media more generally. Both Swedish and Australian news media have regular pieces on how healthcare should be managed in times of COVID-19, often with collective calls to ‘flatten the curve!’ and sometimes with nationalistic under tones.
That phenomena like healthcare are renegotiated is not a new idea. It is a basic theoretical tenet in social constructivist ontologies that cultural phenomena are continually rearticulated, but also that the social is inherently political. What healthcare ‘is’, and correspondingly, how it is enacted in policy, organisations, among professionals and patients, varies depending on ideological, historical and material conditions. What COVID-19 can help remind us, and what I hope will help make my use of the pandemic as an example seem more sensible, is the constructed and ideological character of healthcare.
More importantly though, given the potential consequences for elders and non-doctors, the pandemic could also help restate what we know from other ideological turns, like personalisation, individualisation and marketisation – that they tend to have very tangible effects for everyday users. So while COVID-19 might change things forever, it is still important to peruse less dramatic renegotiations, and explore how they affect different groups in healthcare.
Jens Lindberg is a Research Fellow at the Department of Social Work, Umeå University, Sweden. His research interests are welfare organisations, sexual violence and digitalisation. He is a visiting researcher at the Vitalities Lab. However, due to the massive bush fires in south east Australia followed by the global outbreak of COVID-19, his research visit has turned into a year of self-isolation.
Like many people around the world, all of us in the Vitalities Lab have been adjusting to the ever-changing ‘new normal’. We’re all currently working from home using a range of tools to keep in touch and connected during this time of isolation (you can read about our digital workspace.) Since COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, it has impacted so many aspects of daily life.
Vitalities Lab Postdocs document working from home (left Marianne, top right Ash, bottom right Clare)
During this time of significant disruption to academic work, there has also been a lot of amazing collaboration. Deborah created a ‘Doing Fieldwork in a Pandemic’ – a crowdsourced resource which has received worldwide use (recently translated into French!) and compiles creative ideas about how to do qualitative research in physically distanced ways. In addition, Deborah also compiled some COVID-related open-access resources for social researchers.
Despite the pandemic, things are busy at the Lab and we’re working on lots of different projects – many now adapted for the new COVID world we’re living in. A list of our current projects is below:
Vitalities Lab members proudly displaying our lab branded keep cups in happier pre-COVID times
‘Australians’ Experiences of the COVID-19 Crisis: A Social Research Study’ (Deborah Lupton and Sophie Lewis)
Special section of Health Sociology Review on Sociology and COVID-19 (edited by Deborah Lupton)
The Coronavirus Crisis: Social Perspectives – an edited book by Deborah Lupton with Karen Willis to be published by Routledge
‘Living with Personal Data: Australians’ Experiences and Practices’ (Deborah Lupton, Ash Watson and Mike Michael) – one new focus of this project is people’s experiences of using digital devices in the home under lockdown conditions
‘Reading Zines: A Cultural Sociological Study’ (Ash Watson and Andy Bennett) – including changes in creative practices and community during COVID-19
‘Mapping Queer Histories, Designing Queer Community: A Sociological Study of Queering the Map’ (Ash Watson, Emma Kirby, Brady Robards, Brendan Churchill, Lucas LaRochelle)
Entangled Sporting Bodies: A Lively Introduction to Feminist New Materialisms: a book in progress by Marianne with Holly Thorpe and Julie Brice from University of Waikato
‘Movement and Meaning during COVID-19: Australians’ Experiences of Physical Activity and Uses of Space and Place during the COVID Crisis’. (Marianne Clark)
‘Lipsyncing for our Lives?: TikTok, Health and (Mis)information during the COVID-19 Pandemic’ (Clare Southerton)
‘Digital Parenting and the Deployment and Disruption of Shame Online’ (Marianne Clark, Clare Southerton and Vicki Harman)
‘Time in the Time of Corona’ – a collaborative writing project (Ash Waston, Marianne Clark, Clare Southerton and Katrine Melgaard Kjær)
New academic publications
Deborah’s new book with Zeena Feldman
Lupton, D. and Feldman, Z. (editors) (2020) Digital Food Cultures. London: Routledge
Lupton, D. (2020) Understanding digital food cultures. In Lupton, D. and Feldman, Z. (eds), Digital Food Cultures. London: Routledge, pp. 1-16.
Lupton, D. (2020) Carnivalesque food videos: excess, gender and affect on YouTube. In Lupton, D. and Feldman, Z. (eds), Digital Food Cultures. London: Routledge, pp. 35-49.
Lupton, D. (2020) Vital materialism and the thing-power of lively digital data. In Leahy, D., Fitzpatrick, K. and Wright, J. (eds), Social Theory, Health and Education. London: Routledge, pp. 71-80.
Watson, A. (2020) Moths. Baby Teeth Journal. [Poetry]
Workshops/presentations
Associate Professor Caroline Lenette (left) and Natalie Nesvaderani (right) at the Decolonizing Visual Methods workshop
In February Ash co-ran an invited workshop ‘Affect, Knowledge and Embodiment: A Critical Feminist Arts/Research Workshop’ at the University of Melbourne with Dr Laura Rodriguez Castro and Samantha Trayhurn – you can read more about this workshop on our blog.
The Lab was also fortunate enough to host a workshop from a visiting PhD student Natalie Nesvaderani from Cornell University on ‘Decolonizing Visual Methods with Displaced and Refugee Youth’ on 9th March. You can read more about Natalie’s work here.
On 10th March Marianne and Clare ran a movement-based workshop at UNSW called ‘Moving Data Workshop: Exploring the Sensory Dimensions of Research Practice’, involving creative and physical activities.
Our Moving Data Workshop at the Vitalities Lab, UNSW, pre-COVID
On the 1st April Deborah was an invited speaker for a webinar for QSR International on the topic of ‘Conducting Qualitative Fieldwork During COVID-19’ (slides available online).
Ash was a panellist in a HDR seminar focusing on online interviews and focus groups, which was hosted online by the Centre for Social Research in Health and Social Policy Research Centre, UNSW on April 22.
Deborah was also the speaker for a webinar on ‘More-than-Human Methods and Theories for COVID Worlds’ at Griffith University’s Centre for Social and Cultural Research.
Oprah Magazine quoted Deborah in an article on femtech in the May issue 2020.
The Vitalities Lab is led by SHARP Professor Deborah Lupton, Centre for Social Research in Health and Social Policy Research Centre, UNSW Sydney. Team members are Dr Ashleigh Watson, Dr Clare Southerton and Dr Marianne Clark. Further details here
Vitalities Lab 