Sensory experiments in the exhibition

The More-than-Human Wellbeing Exhibition

In our show, we have four ‘sensory experiments’ which are interactive. We invite people to use their senses of smell and touch as well as sight to engage with these experiments.

These hands-on activities are designed to engage visitors in creative play and making to inspire reflection on the key themes of the exhibition. Visitors are welcome to interact with any of these ‘experiments’ in their own time.

Nature Mood Graphs: Use the test tubes and natural materials provided to demonstrate how you are feeling today (for example, your moods and emotions, health states, wellbeing). Select some materials and pour them into the test tubes at levels that indicate the strength of your feelings.

Essential Elements Feely Boxes (Fire, Earth, Air, and Water): Reach in to touch or smell the materials in the feely boxes. How do these sensations make you feel? What memories do they evoke?

Nature Scents-Making

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Opening event

The More-than-Human Wellbeing Exhibition

Exhibition team members, left to right: Dr Megan Rose, Professor Deborah Lupton, Dr Vaughan Wozniak-O’Connor and Dr Ash Watson

On the evening of 29 May 2023, we held our exhibition opening event. We are grateful to the Dean of our Faculty, Professor Claire Annesley (pictured below left), who provided opening remarks, and to Dr Anthony Brown (below right), Executive Director of Health Consumers NSW, our community partner, who spoke about the value of these kinds of partnerships and arts-based methods for health consumer organisations.

It was wonderful seeing visitors to our show engaging with the exhibition and chatting to them about their responses to it.

Visitors to the exhibition are able to take away copies of our exhibition reader, two zines displayed in the show, and a little card printed on paper with tiny salad seeds , which they can take home and plant (all pictured below). All these (excepting…

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My 2021 publications

Books

Lupton, D., Southerton, C., Clark, M. and Watson, A. (2021) The Face Mask in COVID Times: A Sociocultural Analysis. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Edited books and special issues

Lupton, D. and Willis, K. (eds) (2021) The COVID-19 Crisis: Social Perspectives. Abingdon: Routledge.

‘In and beyond the smart home’ special issue. Convergence (volume 27, issue 5), 2021.

Journal articles

Lupton, D. (2021) Young people’s use of digital health in the Global North: narrative review. Journal of Medical Internet Research, available online at https://www.jmir.org/2021/1/e18286/

Lupton, D. and Southerton, C. (2021) The thing-power of the Facebook assemblage: why do users stay on the platform? Journal of Sociology, 57(4), 969-985.

Lupton, D. (2021) ‘Not the real me’: social imaginaries of personal data profiling. Cultural Sociology, 15(1), 3-21.

Watson, A. and Lupton, D. (2021) Tactics, affects and agencies in digital privacy narratives: a story completion study. Online Information Review, 45(1), 138-156.

Watson, A., Lupton, D. and Michael, M. (2021) Enacting intimacy and sociality at a distance in the COVID-19 crisis: the sociomaterialities of home-based communication technologies. Media International Australia, 178(1), 136-150.

Lupton, D. (2021) ‘Things that matter’: poetic inquiry and more-than-human health literacy. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 13(2), 267-282.

Lupton, D. (2021) ‘The internet both reassures and terrifies’: exploring the more-than-human worlds of health information using the story completion method. Medical Humanities, 47(1), 68-77.

Lupton, D. (2021) ‘Next generation PE?’ A sociomaterial approach to digitised health and physical education. Sport, Education and Society, online first doi.org/10.1080/13573322.2021.1890570

Lupton, D. (2021) ‘Sharing is caring’: Australian self-trackers’ concepts and practices of personal data sharing and privacy. Frontiers in Digital Health, 3(15). Available online at https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fdgth.2021.649275/full

Lupton, D. and Lewis, S. (2021) Learning about COVID-19: a qualitative interview study of Australians’ use of information sources. BMC Public Health, available online at https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-021-10743-7

Lupton, D. (2021) ‘Honestly no, I’ve never looked at it’: teachers’ understandings and practices related to students’ personal data in digitised health and physical education. Learning, Media and Technology, 46(3), 281-293Hjorth, L. and Lupton, D. (2021) Digitised caring intimacies: more-than-human intergenerational care in Japan. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 24(4), 584-602.

Lupton, D. and Watson, A. (2021) Towards more-than-human digital data studies: developing research-creation methods. Qualitative Research, 21(4), 463-480.

Watson, A., Lupton, D. and Michael, M. (2021) The COVID digital home assemblage: transforming the home into a work space during the crisis. Convergence, 27(5), 1207-1221.

Downing, L., Marriott, H. and Lupton, D. (2021) ‘Ninja levels of focus’: therapeutic holding environments and the affective atmospheres of telepsychology during the COVID-19 pandemic. Emotion, Space & Society, 40. Available online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2021.100824

Lupton, D. and Lewis, S. (2021) ‘The day everything changed’: Australians’ COVID-19 risk narratives. Journal of Risk Research, online first, doi.org/10.1080/13669877.2021.1958045

Clark, M. and Lupton, D. (2021) Pandemic fitness assemblages: the sociomaterialities and affective dimensions of exercising at home during the COVID-19 crisis. Convergence, 27(5), 1222-1237.

The Lancet and Financial Times Commission on governing health futures 2030: growing up in a digital world. Kickbusch, I., Piselli, D., Agrawal, A., Balicer, R., Banner, O., Adelhardt, M., Capobianco, E., Fabian, C., Singh Gill, A., Lupton, D., Medhora, R. P., Ndili, N., Ryś, A., Sambuli, N., Settle, D., Swaminathan, S., Morales, J. V., Wolpert, M., Wyckoff, A. W., Xue, L., Bytyqi, A., Franz, C., Gray, W., Holly, L., Neumann, M., Panda, L., Smith, R. D., Georges Stevens, E. A., & Wong, B. L. H. (2021) The Lancet and Financial Times Commission on governing health futures 2030: growing up in a digital world. The Lancet. Available online at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673621018249

Lupton, D. (2021) ‘All at the tap of a button’: mapping the food app landscape. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 24(6), 1360-1381.

Petrie, K., Deady, M., Lupton, D., Crawford, J., Boydell, K. and Harvey. S. (2021) ‘The hardest job I’ve ever done’: a qualitative exploration of the factors affecting junior doctors’ mental health and wellbeing during medical training in Australia. BMC Health Services. Available online at https://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12913-021-07381-5

Book chapters

Lupton, D. (2021) Self-tracking. In Kennerly, M., Frederick, S. and Abel, J.E. (eds), Information: Keywords. Columbia University Press, pp, 187-198.

Lupton, D. (2021) Afterword: future methods for digital food studies. In Leer, J. and Krogager, S.G.S. (eds), Research Methods in Digital Food Studies. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 222-227.

Lupton, D. and Willis, K. (2021) COVID Society: introduction to the book. In Lupton, D. and Willis, K. (eds), The COVID-19 Crisis: Social Perspectives. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 3-13.

Lupton, D. (2021) Contextualising COVID-19. In Lupton, D. and Willis, K. (eds), The COVID-19 Crisis: Social Perspectives. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 14-24.

Other publications

Lupton, D., Pink, S. and Horst, H. (2021) Living in, with and beyond the ‘smart home’: introduction to the special issue. Convergence, 27(5), 1147-1154.

Watson, A., Clark, M., Southerton, C. and Lupton, D. (2021) Fieldwork at your fingertips: creative methods for social research under lockdown. Nature Career Column, 3 March 2021. Available at https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00566-2

Lupton, D., Pink, S. and Horst, H. (2021) Living in, with and beyond the ‘smart home’: introduction to the special issue. Convergence, 27(5), 1147-1154.

New book now out – Creative Approaches to Health Education

This new book, edited with Deana Leahy, is now out with Routledge. It can be ordered from Routledge here, and a preview is available from Google Books here.

The book is chockfull of exciting methods to inspire new ways of thinking, making, doing, learning, teaching and learning across diverse areas of health education: in schools and universities with young people, in the community with migrant women, with women and healthcare providers working with them during childbirth, at a family violence refuge, and online with people working in higher education.

The chapters outline a series of case studies contributed by leaders in the field, describing projects using a wide variety of creative methods conducted in a variety of global contexts. These include a rich constellation of arts- and design-based methods and artefacts: sculptures, dance, walking and other somatic movement, diaries, paintings, drawings, zines, poems and other creative writing, body maps, collages, stories, films, photographs, theatre performances, soundscapes, potions, rock gardens, brainstorming, debates, secret ballots, murals and graffiti walls. There are no rules or guidelines outlined in these contributions about ‘how to do’ creative approaches to health education. However, the methods in the case studies the authors describe are explained in enough detail that they can be adopted or re-invented in other contexts. More importantly, these contributions provide inspiration. They demonstrate what can be done in the field of health education (however it is defined) to go beyond the often stultifying and conventional boundaries it has set for itself.

A COVID-19 tanglegram

It’s Social Sciences Week, and one way to emphasise the complex and nuanced insights offered by social research is to present this COVID-19 tanglegram that I have just drawn. I have built on my own and others’ research into the COVID crisis and its many dimensions in making this tanglegram.

The concept of the ‘tanglegram’ comes from the work of the archeologist Ian Hodder. It’s a similar idea to a mind map or concept map, but it focuses on relationships between people and material things rather than on ideas or concepts. In his 2012 book Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships Between Humans and Things, Hodder explains his sociomaterial perspective. He argues for an approach that can demonstrate how a thing brings other things and people together. It is not a matter of identifying what things ‘do’ for people in a certain cultural and historical context but instead focusing on understanding the thing itself and its multiple connections to other things as well as to people.

Hodder argues that how humans give meaning to things is related to the ways in which they use them and to their links with other things. People use things in often very different ways in different contexts. Hodder discusses how things demand attention and care from people, sometimes facilitating, sometimes hindering human purposes and agency. Things, he says, ‘have lives that follow their own paths’ (Hodder, 2012, p. 13). Hodder notes that all things, whether they are designated as ‘living’ or ‘inert’ are in a state of change.  He further notes that things make people, just as people make things.

There is no doubt that COVID-19 crisis – a combined health and socioeconomic crisis – is a powerful entity that is changing human lives in unprecedented ways. We are still trying to understand how the coronavirus spreads and can be treated and contained. Just when we thought we may have controlled it, it re-emerges again, again creating chaos. But this is not to say that the coronavirus is a thing unto itself – a malevolent enemy that is outside us, trying to break in and destroy us. Rather, the virus and the COVID crisis are entities that are part of complex networks and relationships with people and do not exist outside these networks and relationships. The coronavirus has agency and force, but only with and through humans and other things.

One way in which Hodder documents and explains these relationships and dependencies in his archaeological research is to make what he calls ‘tanglegrams’ or maps in which he traces the connections between a thing and the other things and people to which it is connected. My COVID-19 tanglegram took inspiration from this idea. I started with the broad concept of the ‘COVID assemblage’, which shows how major elements come together: the coronavirus, humans, other animals, place/space/time, affects, things and discourse/culture. This is shown as a simple Venn diagram below.

In drawing the tanglegram I wanted to map in more detail the multiple, constantly changing things and people that come together and come apart as part of the COVID assemblage. I have not been able to include every element or relationship of this assemblage in the tanglegram (that’s simply impossible), but I have included many of the major things, places/spaces, people and organisations that I could think of. Unlike Hodder, I also include affects, as these are crucial to my theorising of how people engage with and form relationships with things.

For me, as a social researcher, this tanglegram helps me understand the power and multi-layered, overwhelming complications of the COVID assemblage in a way that has gone well beyond my initial Venn diagram.

New Vitalities Lab webinar series on innovative methods

Vitalities Lab

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.

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Vitalities Lab Newsletter Number 8

Vitalities Lab

Tuesday 19 May, 2020

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)

As social scientists, lab members have started thinking about some of these impacts and writing about them on our blog. We’ve been thinking about the popularity of home fitness and the emphasis governing bodies continue to place on physical exercise during the pandemic; the role social networking apps like TikTok may play in sharing information about COVID-19; as well as the ways digital…

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Innovative and creative methods for researching people’s use and understandings of their data – a resource list

LIVING WITH PERSONAL DATA

In our Living with Personal Data project, we are experimenting with innovative and creative methods for researching how people use and make sense of their personal digital data. We have put together a resource list of methods used by other researchers as well as those we have experimented with thus far.

Human-computer interaction and design researchers

3D printing of personal data into edible treats (Khot et al., 2014; Khot et al., 2015a) or ‘mocktails’ using personal data (Khot et al., 2015b)

3D printing of personal data into decorative items (Stusak et al., 2014)

Data-things (Nissen and Bowers, 2015)

Data craft (Thudt et al., 2017)

Data comics (Bach et al., 2017; Bach et al., 2018; Lewis and Coles-Kemp, 2014)

Personal visualisations (Thudt et al., 2015; Thudt et al., 2017; Thudt et al., 2018)

Lego modelling (Heath et al., 2019)

Data selfies (Kim et al., 2019)

Various creative methods (collage building, questionable…

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Vitalities Lab Newsletter Number 7

Vitalities Lab

6 February 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 detailshere.

New academic publications

Clark, M. I., & Thorpe, H. (2019). Towards diffractive ways of knowing women’s moving bodies: A Baradian experiment with the Fitbit/motherhood entanglement. Sociology of Sport Journal, Online firsthttps://doi.org/10.1123/ssj.2018-0173

Clark, M. I., Costas-Bradstreet, C., Holt, N. L., & Spence, J. C. (2019). Parental perceptions of a national program that funds sport participation for low-income children and youth in Canada. Leisure Sciences, 1-17.

Thorpe, H. & Clark, M.I. (2019). Gut Feminism, new materialisms and sportwomen’s embodied health: the case of RED-S in endurance athletes. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, DOI: 10.1080/2159676X.2019.1631879

Thorpe, H., Clark, M. & Brice, J. Sportswomen as…

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Data Letters and Data Kondo

LIVING WITH PERSONAL DATA

This week, we experimented with two writing activities that worked towards inspiring people to think creatively about their personal data, with a particular focus on their feelings and relationships with their data. These activities were chosen as a way to engage with a more-than-human approach to personal data understandings and practices that Deborah has been developing in publications such as her Data Selves book, seeking to surface aspects such as the affective forces, relational connections and agential capacities that we have with our data assemblages.

In our fieldwork, we plan to use activities like these as two main ways: first, to inspire people to think otherwise about their data; and second, as a way to kick-start conversations about their data that departs from the standard Q and A format of interviewing that is typically used in sociological research.

We held a workshop in which colleagues from the Vitalities Lab, other…

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