Rebecca Coleman

Dieting temporalities:interaction, agency and the measure of online weight watching

In the context of a concern with achieving a healthy and desirable weight, this article explores the temporalities that underpin dieting and that are produced through interaction with a dieting web site. In contrast to a linear progressive temporality that successful dieting is often understood through, I suggest that the dieting website at stake here attends to and creates new kinds of dieting temporalities, where time is understood as potontial rather than as something which can necessarily be planned. Acknowledging the multiple temporalities of dieting involves an understanding of agency that is not (only) repressed but enabled through interaction with the website’s interface. As such, it becomes important to trace the relationship between temporalities and the kinds of measure involved in online dieting.

Sociology and the virtual : interactive mirrors, representational thinking and intensive power

This article explores the role of images in the workings of contemporary power. It examines one of the central ways in which sociology has approached images as representations and proposes an alternative understanding of images through the concepts of interactivity, intensity and the virtual. Focusing on the examples of three interactive mirrors, one a piece of artwork, another designed to be located in a designer shop and the other a medical mirror for tracking ‘vital signs’, it suggests that the mirrors emphasize the screen and, in so doing, disrupt a notion of images of representations. Images are instead brought to life; intensively experienced rather than extensively read. The article engages, first, with the increasing prevalence of screens and, second, with the moves in sociology towards theorizing the value of the concept of the virtual. Arguing that images are felt and lived out, the article seeks to contribute to how sociology has dealt with, and might further develop, the concept of the virtual as a productive way of understanding the relationships between images, screens, power and life.

Inventive Feminist Theory: Representation, Materiality and Intensive Time

Abstract This article examines key arguments on the relations between bodies and images developed in the context of the discursive turn to consider what light a feminist materialist approach might shed on them. Rather than set the discursive and materialist ‘turns’ in opposition to each other, the author tries to draw connections between different theories of the relations between bodies and images, and unpack how certain feminist concerns are approached from different angles in different historical and intellectual contexts. To do this, the author focuses on the prevalence of images of transformation in contemporary visual culture and analyses them in terms of how both ‘new materialist’ and feminist theories grapple with the worlds they engage with, where change and transformation are seen as key. The author takes up three specific and related points that are currently being debated in feminist materialisms: (1) the concept of representation and, more widely, representational thinking; (2) the concept of causation and an understanding of time as non-linear, intensive and inventive; and (3) the understanding of theory as immanent and inventive. Drawing on insights developed in both the discursive and materialist ‘turns’, the author focuses on how bodies and images are entangled together as material assemblages and, in Barads terms, how theories are performative of the phenomena they seek to understand. The article concludes by suggesting that such an understanding of theory as inventive might be a way of continuing to ensure the animation of feminisms transformative nature.

Austerity Futures: Debt, Temporality and (Hopeful) Pessimism as an Austerity Mood

Abstract:This article examines the relationships between austerity, debt and mood through a focus on temporality and the future. Its starting point is a poll, conducted in Britain in 2011, which showed an increase of pessimism about the future and led to suggestions that ‘a new pessimism’ had become the ‘national mood’. Exploring this survey and other related examples, I ask whether and how pessimism about the future might be considered a mood characteristic of austerity in the UK, consider some of the implications of the future being imagined not as better but as diminished and, drawing on Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism, propose a notion of hopeful pessimism. I explore the politics of pessimism about the future, focusing especially on the affects and emotions that some women and young people might feel. In these senses, I aim to turn around the focus of this special issue to inquire not so much about the future of austerity as about the kinds of futures that are imagined in the new age of austerity, and the affective experiences of such imaginations.

A sensory sociology of the future: Affect, hope and inventive methodologies

This article examines the difficulty of researching the intangibility of the future. Drawing on recent work on visual and sensory sociology, affect, and futurity, I propose that inventive methodologies provide some ways of grasping, understanding, and attuning to the future. To develop this argument, I pay close attention to the Children of Unquiet (2013–2014) film project by artist Mikhail Karikis, which involved Karikis working with children to probe the possible futures of a site that was once invested with hope and progress, but has since been depopulated. In turning to an art project, my intention is to examine the resonances between the project and some of the concerns of a sensory sociology of the future. In particular, I discuss the participation of children, and a conceptualization of hope as potentiality, open, affective and in the present. In conclusion, I explicate how the article seeks to contribute to a sensory sociology of the future by offering some indicative coordinates for this emerging field of research, including its involvement in creating conditions through which possible futures might be invented.

Transforming Images: Screens, Affect, Futures

Contemporary social and cultural life is increasingly organised around a logic of self-transformation, where changing the body is seen as key. Transforming Images examines how the future functions within this transformative logic to indicate the potential of a materially better time. The book explores the crucial role that images have in organising an imperative for transformation and in making possible, or not, the materialisation of a better future. Coleman asks the questions: which futures are appealing and to whom? How do images tap into and reproduce wider social and cultural processes of inequality? Drawing on the recent ‘turns’ to affect and emotion and to understanding life in terms of vitality, intensity and ‘liveness’ in social and cultural theory, the book develops a framework for understanding images as felt and lived out. Analysing different screens across popular culture – the screens of shopping, makeover television programmes, online dieting plans and government health campaigns – it traces how images of self-transformation bring the future into the present and affectively ‘draw in’ some bodies more than others. Transforming Images will be of interest to students and scholars working in sociology, media studies, cultural studies and gender studies.

Introduction to futures in question : theories, methods, practices

‘The future’ has interested philosophers, social theorists, artists, scientists, designers, policy makers, activists and civil rights leaders for many years. While politicians vying for election will often invoke the future as a better time (e.g. Obama’s 2008 ‘Hope’ election campaign, or New Labour’s 1997 ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ election anthem), writers from Barbara Adam (2004a, 2011, Adam and Groves 2007), to Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi (2011) to Slavoj Žižek (2011) and John Urry (2011, 2016) challenge whether this will indeed be the case. Urry (2010: 191) argues that ‘the twentieth century has left a bleak legacy for the new century, with a very limited range of possible future scenarios’. Indeed, as we drafted this introductory text, the World Meteorological Organization reported that ‘we will soon be living with globally averaged CO2 levels above 400 parts per million as a permanent reality’ (Vaughan, 2015), contributing further to climate change and ‘mak[ing] the planet more dangerous and inhospitable for future generations’ (World Meteorological Organization, 2015). Furthermore, in the current climate of austerity (at least in the UK), economists and activists question the notion of ongoing growth, and commentators from radically different perspectives argue that today’s young people are left with ‘no future’ (Giroux, 2011; Willetts, 2011; Clegg, 2011). Culturally, Berardi argues that since the middle of the last century, Western imagination turned decidedly dystopian and utopias are rejected as dangerous illusions (see also Levitas, 2011). However, during the past two decades at least, it is also the case that social scientists have emphasized the hopefulness invested in biotechnology and biomedical advances to bring cures for human disease and argued that biology is no longer fate but

Visualising Surfaces, Surfacing Vision: Introduction

In this Introduction to a special section on ‘Visualizing Surfaces, Surfacing Vision’, the authors argue that to conceive vision in the contemporary world it is necessary to examine its embedding within, expression via and organization on the surface. First, they review recent social and cultural theories to demonstrate how and why an attention to surfaces is salient today. Second, they consider how vision may be understood in terms of surfaces, discussing the emergence of the term ‘surface’, and its transhistorical relationship with vision. Third, they introduce the contributions to the special section, which cover written articles and artworks. They make connections between them, including their exploration of reflexivity and recursion, observation, objectivity and agency, ontology and epistemology, relationality, process, and two- and three-dimensionality. Fourth, the authors consider some implications of an understanding of visualizing surfaces/surfacing vision.

Notes towards a surfacing of feminist theoretical turns

ABSTRACT This article suggests that feminist theoretical turns are illuminating to study, as they make explicit how Western feminist theory is interested not only in the content of different theoretical turns, but also, relatedly, in how these turns move feminist theory in particular directions. Exploring some of the current and historical debates about turns in feminist theory, I pay particular attention to how they might be understood in terms of a wide range of work on the non-linear temporalities of feminist theory. I suggest that one way to understand the non-linear temporalities evident in debates over feminist theoretical turns is through a ‘turn to the surface’. To explicate this suggestion, I offer a series of five indicative issues, terms and ideas, which emerge both from recent work on the surface and feminist theory, and from my attempts to think conceptually about turns, surfaces and the relations between them. These are: (i) reflexivity, (ii) possibility, (iii) lines, (iv) knots, and (v) diagrams. I conclude by raising a number of further points that emerge through an attempt to engage in the surfacing of feminist theory.

Response to McCormack’s Refrains for Moving Bodies

Moving Bodies generates (rather than necessarily states) is one that is more or less disciplinary. It is an imaginary that seeks the spaces in which to experiment with ‘the creation of new modes of encounter between artists and scholars from a variety of disciplines’ (Rubidge, 2009: 3). Notably it finds these as much in those practices we might view as creative and experimental as in those we might view as more mundane. It is a geography whose power for me lies in its presentation of a series of openings onto the possibilities of creative experiments, or better still, propositions – lures to feeling (Manning, 2008) – that draw us towards experimentation. Importantly, this is a geography not unaware of the traditions from which it emerges. Instead it is one that experiments amidst habitual ways of thinking and doing with an ecology of practices ‘with the potential to generate modest variations in moving, thinking and feeling’ (McCormack, 2014: 191). As geography’s relations with arts and humanities disciplines and practices continue to evolve such geohumanities need more propositions like Refrains for Moving Bodies. We need more spaces for experimentation, more sites to examine where their struggles and tensions might reside and how they might enable ways of participating with the world that is about researching and living differently. References