Simone P. Fullagar

• PhD (sociology), UNSW, Sydney
• Professor (Full) at Griffith University

In Australia and other OECD countries women who are recovering from depression in rural areas find that access to professional care is fraught with difficulties. Despite the emphasis on the social determinants shaping mental ill health and recovery, Australian rural support has been largely defined by biomedical and psy-expertise focused on correct...

In this chapter, we explore some of the key insights arising from feminist post-humanist and new materialist approaches, along with critical discussions of popular notions of post-feminism in the context of digital leisure and fourth wave feminism. Over several decades, rich and complex theoretical debates have emerged across social science and hum...

This collection explores how feminist knowledges work as interventions in physical cultures and recognizes the considerable contribution of feminist theories and methodologies in understanding the power relations implicated in embodied movement. Our introductory piece weaves together questions about the gendered formation of physical cultures (acro...

Drawing upon insights from feminist new materialism the book traces the complex material-discursive processes through which women’s recovery from depression is enacted within a gendered biopolitics. Within the biomedical assemblage that connects mental health policy, service provision, research and everyday life, the gendered context of recovery re...

This article explores qualitative research methods that employ materiality and movement, images and body mapping to access research participant knowledges. We examine a methodologies workshop that we co-facilitated for academics and postgraduates. We position the workshop as a research assemblage, through which we facilitated four different methodo...

For people with disability to flourish in sport, providers require more complex understandings of how ableist norms are entangled in sporting cultures. This article examines how neoliberal–ableist logics structure everyday sport contexts, focusing on swimming as one of the most popular sports for people with disability in Australia. We report on th...

This article explores how gender and disability inequity is addressed in research, policy and organisational strategies that shape the Australian sporting landscape. By examining the most current annual reports and strategic plans of 31 national sport organisations, national disabled sport organisations, peak bodies, and government agencies, we ide...

The increasing prevalence of body dissatisfaction among young people is now well recognised with much of the existing literature making connections between media imagery and body dissatisfaction. Media literacy-based interventions continue to be rolled out in schools across the global north in an attempt to prevent body dissatisfaction. However, th...

Focusing on the Australian Football League and its development of a national competition for women, this article contributes toward broader debates around the inclusion and incorporation of women in professional sport. It traces the particular logics and desires (such as corporate expansion) that drove the Australian Football League to develop a wo...

The idea of passing on messages and knowledge to future generations is an ancient one, and yet it is at the same time ‘new’, as we seek to come to grips with social, technological and cultural change in this COVID era. The COVID-19 crisis has had significant gendered impacts, with increased unemployment, higher rates of mental distress and decreasi...

This research explores the perceptions of managers of national parasport organisations in Brazil regarding administrative legacies created through the Rio 2016 Paralympic Games. It contributes to furthering knowledge about how the Paralympic Games influenced enduring changes in administrative processes related to the implementation of elite paraspo...

A plethora of research has focused on how the pandemic has shifted human relations with space, place and wellbeing. Yet, to date few have focused on how the return to public spaces after extended periods of lockdown is impacting subjective wellbeing, particularly amidst a context with fluctuating levels of risk, rapidly changing policy demands and...

In this article, we share a curated version of a Zoom meeting in which we come together-apart to articulate our experiences of the diffractive review process. In the later part of the dialogue, we turn toward imagining the possibilities for creatively exploring ways to represent how the ideas from this collaborative process travel with us, into our...

In this “paper,” we share our process of exploring the possibilities for the emergence of new ways of knowing-thinking-doing response-able collaboration. In an effort to come “together-apart” as author-collaborators, working from our different positionings and locations in the world, we shared text and images of the various ways the ideas from indi...

Feminist engagement with fight sports is often ambivalent given the masculine history of combat and the achievement of “self” transformation at the “expense” of another, exist in tension with the possibilities of women’s empowerment. Acknowledging the multiplicity of embodied meanings produced through Muay Thai Boxing (Thai Boxing), this feminist p...

Athlete health and wellbeing requires a holistic, multidimensional approach to understanding, supporting, and treating individual athletes. Building more supportive, inclusive, and equitable environments for the health and wellbeing of women and gender expansive people further requires gender-responsive approaches that promote broader cultural chan...

Como Fox e Alldred (2020) consideram, o dualismo Cultura / Natureza forneceu aos filósofos, cientistas e cientistas sociais pós-iluministas uma maneira elegante de estabelecer limites para as respectivas preocupações das ciências sociais e naturais (ver também Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2013; Fullagar et al., 2019). Este dualismo tem permitido a criaç...

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 thi...

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...

While there is much research on men's mental health and sport, there has been less focus on women's gendered experiences of mental health and sport. Sport is widely considered to improve or sustain mental health, but it can be a problematic space for women. Focusing on four in-depth interviews with two women from a case study of an Australian field...

In this article we discuss the process and outcomes arising from a unique collaboration involving researchers and professionals to explore key gaps and challenges in sport organizations' responses to violence against women. Using the World Café method in a one-day research forum in Victoria, Australia, we brought together State sport organizations,...

Background: Equine-assisted therapy may promote positive behavior change in young people "at risk." However, it is not always clear what therapeutic content is involved and if a trained therapist is included. The therapeutic effects of the key part of the "therapy," the horse, are not understood. Objectives: To investigate the impact of an equine...

This innovative book provides a critical analysis of diverse experiences of Co-creation in neighbourhood settings across the Global North and Global South. A unique collection of international researchers, artists and activists explore how creative, arts-based methods of community engagement can help tackle marginalisation and stigmatisation, whils...

This chapter thinks through the possibilities and challenges posed by Co-Creation as a knowledge practice that is more than a ‘novel method’ for addressing urban inequality. We consider the onto-ethico-epistemological assumptions that underpin the ‘doing’ of co-creation as inventive practice. Drawing upon Barad (2007), Deleuze and Guattari (1987) a...

The disruptive biocultural force of the coronavirus highlights the value of more-than-human perspectives for examining the gendered effects and affects on our everyday lives and leisure practices. Pursuing this line of thought our article draws upon the insights of feminist new materialism as intellectual resource for considering what the coronavir...

Evidence suggests equine-assisted activities may provide psychological benefits to young people “at-risk.” Results are presented from an equine program among 14- to 16-year-old children (N = 7), mostly boys (N = 6), attending a non-traditional flexi-school in Australia. Thematic analyses were undertaken on observations by facilitators, researchers,...

This article addresses the challenge of promoting physical activity through a focus on equity and engaging physically inactive citizens through the development of inclusive strategies within parkrun UK-a free, volunteer-led, weekly mass community participation running event. We discuss how a UK-based action research design enabled collaboration wit...

This article addresses the challenge of promoting physical activity through a focus on equity and engaging physically inactive citizens through the development of inclusive strategies within parkrun UK-a free, volunteer-led, weekly mass community participation running event. We discuss how a UK-based action research design enabled collaboration wit...

A framework for assessing photographs for the emotional and social health of young people (SHAPE) is described and tested, within the context of a rural program. Two independent raters assessed the photographs of participants. To assess inter-rater reliability, Cohen' K and Kendall's W were calculated. The two reviewers' assessments of photographs...

Health care providers are increasingly prescribing nature exposure to treat emotional, behavioural and cognitive difficulties of children who experience challenging personal and social circumstances. Correlational studies suggest these prescriptions have short-term potential. The capacity for nature exposure to promote long-term change is unclear....

In this chapter we question the assumption that third places are neutral or inherently ‘good’ spaces in contemporary urban life. Drawing upon different feminist perspectives we explore how third places are conceptualised and practiced in gendered waysthat were rarely considered in the early work of Oldenburg (1999). We draw together literature acro...

In this concluding chapter, we focus specifically on gender as a material-discursive phenomena through which identities and social relations are enacted as everyday forms of digital culture and leisure-related practices. The tangible and intangible aspects of our gendered lives are also embedded within the less visible ways digital spaces are desig...

This chapter critically examines the gendered assumptions that inform This Girl Can, a recent digital campaign that has been produced by Sport England to inspire women and girls to be more active. In seeking to represent ‘real’ bodies the campaign has generated an intense affective response from a range of women via social media. However, within th...

In this chapter, we write through an academic-arts collaboration, or ‘creative research assemblage’, to explore the dilemmas surrounding cultural representations of women’s experiences of recovery from depression. We focus our discussion on the Mindshackles website that was created by the second author, Iesha, to offer ‘personal stories about recla...

The proliferation of digital technologies, virtual spaces, and new forms of engagement raise key questions about the changing nature of relationships and identities within democratic societies. This introductory chapter explores the nature of digital spaces and the connected and compounded effects those spaces can have on shaping digital embodiment...

The proliferation of digital technologies, virtual spaces, and new forms of engagement raise key questions about the changing nature of gender relations and identities within democratic societies. This book offers a unique collection of chapters that brings together scholars from diverse backgrounds to explore how gender experiences and identities...

In this paper I discuss how a Physical Cultural Studies approach offers a different way of understanding the complex experiences of health, emotional wellbeing and (in)active embodiment as social practices. Non-communicable ‘diseases’ (diabetes, heart disease, cancer, obesity etc) and sedentary lifestyles are growing public health problems in the g...

Summer camps have been conventionally associated with the positive development of individual character through the promotion of recreational ‘fun.’ However, popular narratives obscure more critical questions concerning the power-knowledge relations that have shaped the provision of summer camp fun as a significant site of child development in Canad...

Cruel Optimism turns toward thinking about the ordinary as an impasse shaped by crisis in which people find themselves developing skills for adjusting to newly proliferating pressures to scramble for modes of living on. (Berlant, 2011, p.8) It is not surprising that resilient selfhood figures in the contemporary cultural imagination as a hopeful n...

"Transforming leisure practices as sites of (un)freedom Professor Simone Fullagar, University of Bath, UK The relationship between labour and leisure, or more often within the vernacular of leisure studies, work and leisure, is one of the foundational almost axiomatic problematics of the field. Indeed, given the way in which 'leisure' has historica...

Despite political change over the past 25 years in Britain there has been an unprecedented national policy focus on the social determinants of health and population-based approaches to prevent chronic disease. Yet, policy impacts have been modest, inequalities endure and behavioural approaches continue to shape strategies promoting healthy lifestyl...

In this chapter we write through an academic-arts collaboration, or creative research assemblage, to explore the dilemmas surrounding cultural representations of women's experiences of recovery from depression. We focus our discussion on the Mindshackles website that was created by, Iesha, to offer 'personal stories about reclaiming life from menta...

To grasp the connectedness of our thoughts, feelings and senses as they are implicated in embodied movement we need more nuanced ways of thinking sport and physical culture as phenomena that materialize through complex biopsychosocial relations (as distinct from biopsy models of illness and treatment). In this chapter I take up the question of how...

This chapter explores how the “affective turn” within feminist theory has shaped new ways of thinking about gendered power relations, subjectivities and embodied sport experiences. Scholarship on affect and emotion has advanced theorizing of embodied movement and meaning to enable more complex understandings of the entanglement of material, viscera...

In this paper, we offer a new conceptual approach to analyzing the interrelations between formal and informal pedagogical sites for learning about youth mental (ill) health with a specific focus on digital health technologies. Our approach builds on an understanding of public pedagogy to examine the pedagogical modes of address (Ellsworth 1997) tha...

Critiques of public health policies to reduce physical inactivity have led to calls for practice-led research and the need to reduce the individualising effects of health promotion discourse. This paper examines how parkrun-an increasingly popular, regular, community-based 5km running event-comes to be understood as a 'health practice' that allows...

Academic, policy, and public concerns are intensifying around how to respond to increasing mental health problems amongst young people in OECD countries such as the UK and Australia. In this paper we make the case that public knowledge about mental health promotion, help-seeking, support and recovery can be understood as an enactment of public peda...

A recurring theme has emerged from past ANZALS (Australia and New Zealand Association for Leisure Studies) Conferences' keynote presentations concerning the status of leisure studies from a teaching and research perspective. While this broad discussion has been raised, little is formally known about the current status of leisure studies in Australi...

This chapter moves beyond the social construction of mental health and illness, to engage with post-structuralist debates that emphasis the material, discursive and affective workings of power. Foucault's work has significantly shaped how mental illness has been problematized and made thinkable as an historical category. Focussing on the power-know...

In this article, I examine the ‘turn to’ post-qualitative inquiry (PQI), new materialism and post-humanist theories to consider the challenges of, and implications for, doing research in sport, health and physical culture. The term ‘post-qualitative inquiry’ indicates a decisive departure from the ethico-onto-epistemological assumptions that have i...

Despite the proliferation of doctoral training courses within universities, little attention is paid to the complexity of supervision as a process of becoming for both students and supervisors. As post-qualitative researchers we explore how collaborative writing can be mobi-lised as a rhizomatic practice to open up engagements with supervision that...

In this article I examine the 'turn to' post-­‐qualitative inquiry, new materialism and post-­‐ humanist theories to consider the challenges of, and implications for, doing research in sport, health and physical culture. The term 'post-­‐qualitative inquiry' (PQI) indicates a decisive departure from the ethico-­‐onto-­‐epistemological assumptions t...

Despite the proliferation of doctoral training courses within universities, little attention is paid to the complexity of supervision as a process of becoming for both students and supervisors. As post-qualitative researchers we explore how collaborative writing can be mobilised as a rhizomatic practice to open up engagements with supervision that...