Moving Bodies Lab

Public health initiatives and interventions aimed at encouraging people to ‘sit less’ and ‘move more’ are commonplace, yet policy gains from such promotional efforts are modest. Calls from across the medical and social sciences increasingly emphasise the need to rethink our approach to understanding moving bodies; that more of the same is not enough. The question is: How?  

Led by Cassandra Phoenix, alongside a cross-disciplinary team within the Institute for Medical Humanities, involving  Sarah Atkinson, Megan Girdwood, Tessa Pollard, and Fraser Riddell, the Moving Bodies Lab is an interdisciplinary lab dedicated to expanding dominant framings of bodily movement within the context of public health and wellbeing.  

Part methods incubator, part research hub, Lab activities explicitly seek to identify and bridge different framings of moving bodies from across the social sciences, arts, and humanities, broadening how they are understood and included in health and wellbeing contexts. This is achieved through conceptual, methodological and practice-based explorations that foreground scale (e.g. spaces, speed, stillness, amplitude, depth of movement), relations (e.g. moving for, with, through, within, in spite of), and sites (e.g. material, intangible, as collectives, single bodies, body parts) of embodied, moving matters. 

If you’d like to contact the Moving Bodies Lab or be added to our mailing list for updates about our events and activities, please email us.