Doing more with movement: constituting healthy publics in movement volunteering programmes

Emily Tupper,Sarah Atkinson,Tessa M Pollard

doi:10.1057/s41599-020-0473-9

Abstract

The recent phenomenon of movement volunteering programmes is a form of ‘fitness philanthropy’ that combines exercise with volunteering in order for physical activity to generate a more widely shared set of benefits. These newest practices of fitness philanthropy radically rework both exercise and volunteering through the ways in which these come together and take place outdoors and in the everyday spaces of the street or community. The paper explores these new practices through the movement volunteering programme ‘GoodGym’, in relation to the concept of ‘healthy publics’. Fieldwork comprised ethnography, including participant observation, interviews, go-along interviews, conversations, photography and an end of fieldwork discussion workshop. We focus on the experiences of three different constituencies in GoodGym: the volunteers; the participants and passers-by; the space and atmosphere. The formation of these dynamic, multiple and shifting healthy publics emerge through the complex intersections of several processes. We draw particular attention to the centrality in the new fitness philanthropy practices of visibility and spectacle, sociality and merging mobilities in constituting healthy publics.

Highlights

We explore the simultaneous ways in which people become active while maintaining and transforming physical and relational aspects of the public through the recent phenomenon of movement volunteering programmes, the newest version of everyday ‘fitness philanthropy’ (Palmer and Dwyer, 2019)
We propose that these new practices engage, participate with and influence public spaces and those in them, and, through their visibility and spectacle, sociality and a merging of embodied mobilities, bring into being improvised and everyday ‘healthy publics’ (Hinchliffe et al, 2018)
We argue that these programmes constitute particular opportunities for the formation of healthy publics through new kinds of public participation, engagement and social contract, in which health becomes a collective process and through which ‘moving together’ in everyday spaces is imagined and realised to mutual benefit

Summary

Introduction

We explore the simultaneous ways in which people become active while maintaining and transforming physical and relational aspects of the public through the recent phenomenon of movement volunteering programmes, the newest version of everyday ‘fitness philanthropy’ (Palmer and Dwyer, 2019) We propose that these new practices engage, participate with and influence public spaces and those in them, and, through their visibility and spectacle, sociality and a merging of embodied mobilities, bring into being improvised and everyday ‘healthy publics’ (Hinchliffe et al, 2018). The paper draws on research with a movement volunteering programme designed to bring people together and, at the same time, provide inclusive and collective experiences of movement and philanthropic activity We argue that these programmes constitute particular opportunities for the formation of healthy publics through new kinds of public participation, engagement and social contract, in which health becomes a collective process and through which ‘moving together’ in everyday spaces is imagined and realised to mutual benefit. We do this through an ethnographic case study of GoodGym, an organisation exemplifying the emergence of movement volunteering, a version of fitness philanthropy (Palmer, 2018) and which combines embodied performances of health through physical activity and the moral imaginings of public through voluntary action

Physical activity and the running boom

Engaging and participating in public spaces

Constituting healthy publics

Findings

Additional information