Revisioning Fitness through a Relational Community of Practice: Conditions of Possibility for Access Intimacies and Body-Becoming Pedagogies through Art Making

Meredith Bessey (), K. Aly Bailey, Kayla Besse, Carla Rice, Salima Punjani and Tara-Leigh F. McHugh
Additional contact information
Meredith Bessey: Department of Family Relations and Applied Nutrition, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON N1G 2W1, Canada
K. Aly Bailey: Department of Health, Aging & Society, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON L8S 4L8, Canada
Kayla Besse: Stratford Festival, Stratford, ON N5A 6V2, Canada
Carla Rice: Department of Family Relations and Applied Nutrition, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON N1G 2W1, Canada
Salima Punjani: Independent Self-Employed Artist and Curator, Montreal, QC H3N 1T7, Canada
Tara-Leigh F. McHugh: Faculty of Physical Education & Recreation, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB T6G 2R3, Canada

Social Sciences, 2023, vol. 12, issue 10, 1-16

Abstract: ReVisioning Fitness is a research project and community of practice (CoP) working to reconceptualize “fitness” through a radical embrace of difference (e.g., trans, non-binary, queer, Black, people of colour, disabled, and/or fat, thick/thicc, curvy, plus sized), and a careful theorising of inclusion and access. Our collaborative and arts-based work mounts collective resistance against the dominant power relations that preclude bodymind differences within so-called “fitness” spaces. In this work, we build queer, crip, and thick/thicc alliances by centring relational and difference-affirming approaches to fitness, fostering a radical CoP that supports dissent to be voiced, access intimacies to form, and capacitating effects of body-becoming pedagogies to be set in motion. In this article, we consider how conditions of possibility both co-created and inherited by researchers, collaborators, and the research context itself contributed to what unfolded in our project and art making (multimedia storytelling). By a radical CoP, we mean that we mobilise a more relational and difference-affirming notion of CoP than others have described, which often has involved the reification of sameness and the stabilisation of hierarchies. Further, we call on leaders in fitness organisations to open conditions of possibility in their spaces to allow for alternative futures of fitness that centre difference.

Keywords: participatory research; fitness; communities of practice; disability arts; access intimacy; body-becoming (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A B N P Y80 Z00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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