Reimagining health and fitness materials: an affective inquiry into collaging

Carrie Safron

doi:10.7577/rerm.3668

Abstract

This paper, or ‘experiment,’ draws on data from a health and fitness scrapbooking project with four Black and Latinx youth. While the data are part of a longer 18-month visual ethnography (Pink, 2013), the focus here began to consider one week of the project in which the four youth and I interacted with health and fitness related magazines. In that week, we created magazine re-assemblages in our scrapbooks. To reimagine what ‘matters’ for education research and pedagogical practices in health, fitness and physical culture, I re-visited data (Levy, Halse & Wright, 2016) through an affective lens (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), drawing on PhEmaterialism (Ringrose, Warfield & Zarbadi, 2019). The affective lens produced a collage inquiry entangled with doubt (Holbrook & Pourchier, 2014), wonder (MacLure, 2013a) and slowness (Renold, 2018), which began to open up possibilities to think-see-feel my way through the data and the process differently.

Highlights

While PhEmaterialism is composed of multiple theories (Ringrose et al, 2019), one in particular came to matter in this research – affect (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Hickey-Moody, 2013; Niccolini et al, 2018)
As I wrote in the ‘prologue,’ I did not begin this doctoral dissertation with an affective lens
Seigworth and Gregg (2010) wrote in their introduction to The Affect Theory Reader, “There is no single, generalizable theory of affect” (p. 3) and, I do not stick to a clear ‘definition’ as I work with affect throughout this ‘experiment.’ Still, I would be remiss if I did not mention how I came to think-work with affect in the instance of this paper

Summary

What does this paper do?

Parts of the data (and the process) kept nagging at me and could not be captured through traditional qualitative approaches As this nagging continued, I was drawn to affect (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987); these were the sensations, intensities and forces of everyday life that began to (unexpectedly) manifest in relations between human (researcher, participants) and non-human (materials, knowledge, culture) bodies, in turn, producing further affects (or potential openings and/or closings). I was drawn to affect (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987); these were the sensations, intensities and forces of everyday life that began to (unexpectedly) manifest in relations between human (researcher, participants) and non-human (materials, knowledge, culture) bodies, in turn, producing further affects (or potential openings and/or closings) Through such re-visiting and re-thinking (Levy et al, 2016), this paper began to draw on one week of a scrapbooking project that was part of the 18-month visual ethnography. This journey came to (re-)present the affective inquiry, an entanglement of theory, methods and ‘findings,’ that is explored

An affective inquiry

Reimagining research and practice through affect