Naomi Smith

The ‘fit healthy’ body has been invoked in popular discourse as far less vulnerable to communicable diseases like the novel coronavirus both in mainstream accounts of the pandemic and in more fringe anti-vaccine discourse. Those opposed to vaccination argue the management of the body through diet and exercise allows for natural immune processes to manage COVID-19. This chapter interrogates anti-vaccine sentiment in Western countries such as Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States to demonstrate the pervasiveness of discourses that position the maintenance of a ‘fit healthy’ ideal body as an alternative to preventative medicine such as vaccines. Drawing on several key examples, this conceptual chapter explores the ways bodily ‘wellness’ became a part of vaccine hesitancy discourse during the pandemic, as risk is balanced through calculations of what vaccines might ‘do’ to a body and the body’s capacity to respond to illness.

Wellness has moved beyond its original emancipatory roots to become a mechanism for self-optimisation. In this chapter, the authors examine how wellness transforms or ‘wellness washes’ pleasurable practices into rationalised and instrumentalised ones. The authors argue that one of the key drivers of ‘wellness washing’ is the entanglement of wellness with and in contemporary workplaces. In advance of this analysis, the authors examine digital pleasures, ASMR and digital drugs to examine how pleasures mediated and afforded by the screen are ‘wellness washed’ to better position them as normative cultural practices.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound presents the key subjects and approaches of anthropological research into sound cultures. What are the common characteristics as well as the inconsistencies of living with and around sound in everyday life? This question drives research in this interdisciplinary area of sound studies: it propels each main chapter of this handbook into a thoroughly different world of listening, experiencing, receiving, sensing, dreaming, naming, desiring, and crafting sound. This handbook is composed of six sections: sonic artifacts; sounds and the body; habitat and sound; sonic desires; sounds and machines; and overarching sensologies. The individual chapters explore exemplary research objects and put them in the context of methodological approaches, historical predecessors, research practices, and contemporary research gaps. This volume offers therefore one of the broadest, most detailed, and instructive overviews on current research in this area of sensory anthropology. [Book Synopsis]

Crime is often considered to be absent in idyllic and idealised rural communities. Rural communities, too, are often perceived as having static and close-knit community bonds that facilitate social control and explain the perceived absence of crime. They are, in essence, place-based communities. Even when invoked symbolically, they are still tied to the geographical particularities of the ‘the rural’. This chapter argues that the image of rural spaces as home to tight-knit, closely bound communities perhaps explains the comparative lack of research regarding social media use in rural communities. If rural communities are ‘traditional’ communities that prioritise face-to-face communication, it is easy to see how social media might be easily dismissed as irrelevant to their social fabric. However, rural communities have always existed in networks with other places. This chapter discusses the existing literature on social media in rural communities and on crime prevention in rural communities and argues that engagement on and through social media may have positive results for crime prevention.

Social media is a key platform through which communities can organise, connect and communicate. As such we argue that it can provide insight into how regional places and communities are imagined through digital platforms. Social media platforms like Facebook provide a way for researchers to map the virtual geography of real places. Often place-based community activity on social networks sites is a response to transition and change. Social media provides us with a way to assess and measure the community’s response to change and crisis. This chapter will explore the ways in which digital social research methods can enhance understandings of place-based regional identities during and after times of crisis. We examine a case study from the Latrobe Valley in regional Victoria to consider how Facebook in particular provides a window to the complicated affective relationships to place that emerge in times of crisis and strife.