Led by the School of Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Sciences, this international seminar series features speakers from the University of Newcastle alongside some of the biggest international scholars in sociology, digital humanities, communications, media studies, and education, responding to key social issues of our time: automation, democracy, wellness and conspiracies, material inequalities, and science and nature, and youth digital identities. The series is designed to showcase the importance of social science research in leading responses to these issues.
Wellness is perhaps one of the most fundamental contemporary human aspirations. In world where there are ever more pressures on making yourself into the ideal citizen, worker or partner, a turn to personal wellness is understandable: who doesn’t want to be well? Who doesn’t want to be their best self? ‘Wellness’ is not just a big business; it is gargantuan as a 1.8 trillion dollar global industry. Our pursuit of wellness to help deal with the anxieties of labour market precarity, cost of living crises and finding a partner, provides huge opportunities for profit, from global companies touting miracle anti-aging supplements, to micro-influencers spruiking everything from raw diets, crystals, and personal leadership courses. Most recently we have seen a rise in fascist tendencies in wellness cultures, spoken ‘out loud’ in online wellness spaces or enacted in White House public health policies. These features are not new in public health discourses: they are informed by centuries old Enlightenment philosophies founded on biological essentialist and evolutionary explanations of the social world. This seminar features leading scholars in the fields of wellness sociology, digital media and public health to explore how contemporary discourses of wellness are aligned with the enactments and dynamics of everyday politics, and their consequences.
Eating Ancestrally, Carnivorously: (re)constructing masculinity through food
Naomi Smith (University of Sunshine Coast)
Food bears an uneasy relationship with some form of contemporary masculinity. This is perhaps best typified by Tucker Carlson’s documentary, The End of Men, which blames ‘soy globalism’ for a claimed decline in ‘real men’, partly because, it is claimed, male vitality (and virility) has been diminished as animal products have been replaced with soy (Muller, Rooney and Ceja 2024). This line of argument was also taken up by various Republicans who claimed that progressive social policy aimed to ‘take Americans’ burgers’, and replace them with plant-based, feminising alternatives (Rooney 2025), creating a literal crisis of masculinity. The solution to this has been a range of food-based, masculinised wellness practices, that point to the entanglement of masculinity and food on a visceral level. Here, wellness practices do double duty, reemphasising and reinscribing what Butler terms the ‘irreducible materiality’ (1993, 4) of the sexed body while also surfacing cultural constructions of gender. This seminar focuses on how food is taken up as part of men’s wellness practices through a close examination of the Liver King’s dietary advice, and the carnivore diet championed by Jordan Peterson, which promise men renewed dominance and virality. Both Peterson and the Liver King’s dietary advice venerate ‘ancestral’ ways of eating that serve to naturalise fascist ideology, specifically as it relates to the (re)creation of gender.
Naomi Smith is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of the Sunshine Coast. She is also the co-lead of the Society, Law and Humanities (SOLAH) Lab. Her research focuses on how wellness, conspiracy and misinformation circulate as affective as embodied practices through digital platforms. She also researches the aesthetics of GenAI, and GenAI interfaces Naomi’s latest co-edited collection is Researching Contemporary Wellness Practices (Emerald). Her next book, What other people eat: Exploring Digital Food Cultures (forthcoming, Emerald), examines the affective flows of digital food cultures, with a particular focus on how they materialise and embody misinformation. Contact: nsmith7@usc.edu.au
Wellness time in digital cultures
Natalie Ann Hendry (University of Melbourne)
Different health and wellbeing practices each have their own temporality: going to the doctor requires time to make an appointment, sitting in a waiting room, and then talking with a doctor for eight, nine, or perhaps 15 or more minutes. Treatments and ‘getting well’, regardless of one's preferred health beliefs, need time to work — whether it be waiting for antibiotics to help the body clear infection, routinely ingesting supplements to boost hormone levels or strengthen muscles, hair or nails, or perhaps watching the slow process of recovery after surgery or a cupping session. Wellness cultures that centre optimising one’s body and mind as a moral and symbolic good, especially those enabled and amplified by digital media, promise their own temporal order. This timing is typically in opposition to the supposedly too-quick, too-dismissive biomedical time of hospital and doctors’ clinics. As I have described elsewhere, this “temporal flexibility” of wellness culture and its industries promotes the value of listening to one’s own body and its rhythms, while at the same time pushes calls to act now and buy your way to health. Digital media and wellness cultures mutually produce personalised and commodified wellness knowledges that are legitimised and made credible, I argue, because of their temporal claims and social timing. To explore this idea, I offer two case studies of wellness time. The first considers marketing emails from wellness influencers and entrepreneurs and how they offer temporal abundance through their practices and products; the second positions wellness and self-care social media content alongside young adults’ psychotherapy practices, where seemingly bland, simple or ‘basic’ posts fill the time between therapy appointments and take on a pedagogical role.
Natalie Ann Hendry is a Senior Lecturer in Youth Wellbeing in the Youth Research Collection, in the Faculty of Education, The University of Melbourne. Natalie’s research investigates the relationships between education, health and media in young adults’ lives, with a focus on critical approaches to wellbeing and mental health. Her current work explores the pedagogical relationship between social media and psychotherapy and how digital finance cultures influence wellbeing, finance and investing practices. Her first book, tumblr (Polity Press), was released in 2021 and co-authored with Katrin Tiidenberg and Crystal Abidin. Natalie’s research has also been published in the Social Media + Society, Journal of Sociology, Media International Australia, and Learning, Media & Technology.
Anti-fluoride movements and the politics of water purityMatt Wade (La Trobe University)
Community water fluoridation (CWF) ranks among the world’s greatest public health success stories, substantially decreasing tooth decay and related health issues, especially among children. However, a growing alliance of seemingly disparate views – e.g. distrust of ‘mass medication’ and scientific legitimacy, the rise of wellness movements, libertarian calls for freedom of choice and ‘personal responsibility’, increasingly belligerent anti-state agitations among far-right conspiracy theorists, and now RFK Jr’s agenda to ‘Make America Healthy Again’ – has entailed that CWF programs are now under serious threat. Indeed, the hasty anticipatory obedience of some jurisdictions (e.g. Utah, Florida) in ceasing water fluoridation has raised concerns that CWF across the world may face an irrevocable decline, including in Australia. Since its first introduction in 1958 CWF schemes spread quickly across Australia, with around 90% of the population having access to fluoridated water at its peak. The conspicuous exception to this is Queensland, where the decision whether to fluoridate water supplies is decided by local councils. In 2001, less than 5% of the Queensland population had access to fluoridated water, despite strong public support. In response, in 2008 the Labor Government implemented a policy to ensure all communities with more than 1000 people would have fluoridated water. Within four years, 90% of Queenslanders had access to fluoridated water. However, in 2012, the incoming Liberal Government altered the policy dramatically, stating that the decision would be given to local councils. The result has been a precipitous decline in fluoridation across Queensland, with many councils – all in rural and non-regional areas – deciding to cease their CWF programs. In part, these deliberations are now informed by the infiltration of far-right interests into local government. Focussing on key case studies in local council decision-making, this talk explores: how were decisions made to cease fluoridation?; what reasons were given?; what key actors shaped these deliberations, and what tactics did they use?; was the local community consulted?; were health and medical experts engaged?; and is there even adequate record keeping of all this? In some instances, such decisions are being made with troubling haste, driven by misinformation, without community inclusion, nor engagement with relevant health expertise of any kind. CWF presents as an obvious target for a wider agenda to dismantle the paternalistic state’s ‘artificial’ solutions, in favour of a supposed return to personal liberties via an embrace of ‘natural’ remedies. The relative ease with which policy arenas have been captured by this curious assemblage of interests indicates troubling times ahead for wider public health causes, and we now face an urgent need to develop improved deliberative democratic approaches and health communication strategies.
Matt Wade is a Lecturer in Social Inquiry and Discipline Lead for Sociology at La Trobe University. His primary research interests mainly revolve around spaces of ethical and moral contestation over 'deservedness' and obligations of care, particularly within charity, philanthropy, and social policy more broadly.
