This essay engages with pandemic-era artistic practice, asking how digital technologies are being taken up out of desires and attempts to be intimate with, proximate to, ‘contemporary’ with one another. Drawing on theories of pandemic temporality and on media analysis approaches that highlight the digital’s materiality, affectivity, and self-reflexivity, we think with three first-person, visual-digital works composed, circulated, and archived during the COVID-19 pandemic: Ella Comberg’s research creation photo-essay on Google Street View, titled ‘Eye of the Storm,’ Bo Burnham’s Netflix streaming special Inside, and Richard Fung’s short documentary film ‘[…],’ shot on iPad. We suggest that these visual-digital pieces open onto the promises and limitations of mediated intimacies – with others, with ourselves, and with the space-time of lockdown. Their commitments to texture and tension draw out the ‘impurity’ ( Shotwell 2016 ) of our digital lifeworlds, while also attuning us to possibilities for ‘waiting with’ ( Baraitser and Salisbury 2020 ) one another amidst what Nadine Chan (2020) calls the ‘distal temporalities’ of late capitalism. To deliberately dwell in stuck or looped time and linger over the touch of distant, distal others – or what we call asynchronous encounters – is not to indulge or excuse the ways in which contemporary media platforms capitalise on affective and creative labour or surveil digital lifeworlds. Instead, we posit that the textures, glitches, and flickering bonds of mediated intimacy may offer new, multiple, reflexive and recursive pathways ‘toward inhabited futures that are not so distal’ ( Chan 2020 : 13.6).

In this article we examine women-specific adventure sport skills training courses in the UK utilising a feminist new materialist approach. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's (1987) concepts of ‘assemblage’, ‘lines of territorialisation’, and ‘lines of flight’, we apply a new lens to ask: what type(s) of material-discursive assemblages are produced through human and non-human, discursive, and non-discursive intra-actions on women-specific adventure sport skills courses? To what extent do these courses enable participants to engage with an alternative praxis and ethics and to think, feel, practice, and become otherwise? Our Deleuzian reading showed that the affective capacity of these courses is currently limited by dominant understandings of these courses as bridges to the real outdoors and as primarily designed for women who lack the confidence to participate in mixed-gender environments. However, these courses also enabled productive lines of flight and alternative understandings and practices related to the self, the body, others, material objects, learning, movement, and physical activity to emerge. These were both characterised and supported by less instrumental and hierarchical flows of relations and an openness to not knowing.

In this article I turn to the theorist Georges Bataille to explore how the transgressive elements of training in mixed martial arts (MMA) facilitate a sense of intimacy and feeling of community among the participants. To build this argument, I draw on ten years spent alongside the hobbyists and competitors who spend their free hours in mixed martial arts gyms punching, kicking, choking, and hurting each other. Taking inspiration from Bataille, along with new engagements with materialism within studies of sport, I make central the exchange of sweat, touch, scent, germs, hair, saliva, blood, and pain. Through combining core elements of Bataille's writings with stories from the MMA gym, I direct attention to the allure of fleshy moments of excess, vulnerability, transgression, and communication. I conclude with a reflection on the gendered expectations that proliferate the gym, the challenges presented by the commodification of the practice, and the radical potentials of play and care.

Since the early 2000s, athleisure (clothing designed for physical activity) has been gaining popularity as both a functional and fashionable clothing trend, particularly among women. Thus far, scholars have explored the gendered nature of athleisure and the neoliberal, postfeminist, and healthism discourses present within this fitness clothing phenomenon. However, the research has yet to account for the materiality of athleisure and its impacts upon women's experiences of fitness and the construction of idealized female bodies. In this article, we use new materialist theory, specifically Karen Barad's agential realism, to explore the material-discursive dimensions of athleisure. Drawing upon a diffractive analysis of interviews conducted with 22 women in Aotearoa New Zealand, in conjunction with social media analyses, we explore two lively intra-actions of women's athleisure-clad moving bodies – the ‘muffin top’ and the ‘big booty’ – to reveal what athleisure does to/with women's bodies. We highlight how these athleisure-body intra-actions work to create boundaries around acceptable femininity and give rise to particular constructions and meanings of women's bodies.

This article explores qualitative research methods that employ materiality and movement, images and body mapping to access research participant knowledges. We examine a methodologies workshop that we co-facilitated for academics and postgraduates. We position the workshop as a research assemblage, through which we facilitated four different methodological ‘moves’, to borrow from Barad's (2007) notion of ‘cuts’, to invite learning-knowing through the movement of affect. These embodied methodologies included: moving-writing sport, digital photovoice, movement improvisation, and body mapping somatic movement. Workshop participants were invited to experiment with each method as a means of engaging with tacit, or difficult to articulate knowledges. By exploring what these embodied ‘moves’ do to our ways of knowing, we traced the affective relations that entangle human and nonhuman worlds, self and others, researcher and researched through the workshop intra-actions. Our accounts of each method are diffracted through affective relations as we attune to bodies, vulnerabilities, openings, objects, texts, thoughts, surfaces, and senses, as means of (un)learning together. We articulate the kinds of productive (un)learning that moved us in different ways, and how embodied, feminist new materialist approaches might contribute to defamiliarised approaches to research.