Habit, Temporality and the Body as Movement: '5:2 Your Life'

This article explores the 5:2 dietary plan in terms of the relationship between habit, temporality and matter through a focus on the somatechnics of the body in movement. It makes links between some of the recent work on the body and habit which suggests, broadly speaking, that habit is an important way of understanding the body, the social and the temporal, and recent work on the body and animation and automation. This latter set of literature explores how animation, traditionally the preserve of the human, is now also a capacity of non-human entities or technologies and, as such, raises questions as to whether the dichotomies of human/non-human, bodies/technologies and nature/culture can hold. The article examines how a prevalent framing of the blurring of the distinction between animation and automation is to see various technologies as ‘creeping’ into the realm of the body, threatening to turn humans into automations. However, through a focus on critical arguments about the impossibility of maintaining dichotomies, it argues that the 5:2 plan can be understood to emerge from an awareness of, and as a response to, a temporally and socially specific configuration of nature and culture, bodies and technologies, and animation and automation

Technology for Situated and Emergent Play : A Bridging Concept and Design Agenda

Despite the capacity of play to spontaneously emerge in our daily life, the scope of application of play design in HCI is generally narrower, specifically targeting areas of pure leisure, or wholly utilitarian and productive play. Here we focus on the value of play design to respond to and support our natural gravitation towards emergent play that helps to meet our social and emotional needs. We present a bridging concept: Technology for Situated and Emergent Play, i.e. technology design that supports playful engagement that emerges interwoven with our everyday activities outside leisure, and that enriches these activities with socio-emotional value. Our intermediate-level contribution has value as a synthesis piece: it weaves together theories of play and play design and bridges them with concrete design examples. As a bridging concept, it contributes: i) theoretical grounding; ii) inspiring design exemplars that illustrate the theory and foreground its value; and iii) design articulations in the form of valuable experiential qualities and design features. Our work can help to focus design agendas for playful technology and inspire future designs in this space

Coming Out as Fat

This paper examines the surprising case of women who "come out as fat" to test and refine theories about social change, social mobilization, stigma, and stigma resistance. First, supporting theories about "social movement spillover," we find that overlapping memberships in queer and fat activist groups, as well as networks between these groups, have facilitated the migration of this cultural narrative. Second, we find that the different, embodied context of body size and sexual orientation leads to changes in meaning as this narrative travels. Specifically, the hyper-visibility of fat changes what it means to come out as a fat person, compared to what it means to come out as gay or lesbian. Third, this case leads us to question the importance of the distinction made in the literatures on stigma and on social movements between assimilationist strategies that stress sameness, on the one hand, and radical political strategies that emphasize difference, on the other. Finally, this case suggests that the extent to which a stigmatized trait is associated with membership in a social group-with its own practices, values, and norms- shapes what it means to "come out" as one who possesses that trait. © 2011 American Sociological Association