Members of the Institute for Medical Humanities’ Moving Bodies Lab reflect on a series of talks and workshops exploring what it means to be slow, still, and sedentary.
The health potential of the moving body is often framed in contrast to a body that is not moving, or not moving enough. Last month, the Moving Bodies Lab hosted a workshop to explore the ideas, practices, and methods that are at play in our understandings of health and the moving body, through a focus on slowing and stillness. The workshop involved four speakers (authors of this piece) and fifteen participants, including academics working within and across the social sciences, arts and humanities, dancers, and health practitioners.
Slowing and still bodies may present themselves in different ways in different disciplines. For example, the reclining figure is a pose that is seen time and time again in art throughout history, encouraging the viewer to gaze upon a body that is horizontal, and for art historians to consider the meanings and contexts of this enduring pose.
In physical activity research, methods to capture and represent the reclining or still body often occur through objective measurement of physical activity over a 24-hour period. Time spent not moving is then classified as “sedentary time” or sedentary behaviour”, with prolonged bouts of sedentary time being linked to adverse health outcomes and considered a major public health issue.
These vastly different ways of representing and interpreting a non-moving body invite interdisciplinary reflection on where our curiosities in slowing and still bodies lie and what a focus on them might reveal. Why are these bodies represented, measured, and valued in such different ways, and how do they occupy discursive and material landscapes.
The workshop took a critical approach to the public health issue of sedentarism and physical inactivity by asking: What are bodies doing when they are slowing or still? Through a series of talks and practical sessions, participants explored the contexts, technologies, relationships and cultures of slow and still bodies, and how they relate to understandings of health and wellbeing.
Our first speaker, health and cultural geographer and creative methodologist Chloe Asker, opened the workshop with an invitation to practice mindfulness of the breath-body together:
Narrow your focus again now to your upper torso, rising and falling with the breath ….
…. Now focus on your head, feeling air entering in, filling it, and releasing…
…. Settle on the nostrils, feeling the sensations of the breath passing in and out….
…. Continue to hold your attention on the breath – if your attention wanders, note that it did, and gently bring it back to the breath.
(Excerpt from warming up meditation from London Radical Mindfulness)
After the practice, participants were asked to share their experiences amongst the group. Many spoke about how these exercises could play a useful and important role in academic spaces, but how stillness and slowness is often sidelined in favour of productivity and speed.
Coming together to discuss experiences of meditation provided an opportunity to collectivise internal or seemingly individual experiences. In mindfulness-based teaching, this is called ‘horizontal inquiry’ (McCown et al., 2010). Horizontal inquiry widens dialogue to include the whole group to demonstrate shared experience, and to build a cohesive unit or a sense of community in the class.
The practice laid the foundation to explore the politicisation of the breath – the ways in which our individual breath-bodies are entangled to the rhythms and changes of the Earth. “I can’t breathe” – signalling the rallying call of the Black Lives Matter Movement, the inability to breathe clean air in the wake of environmental destruction, or the threat of an invisible air-borne virus that caused a multi-year global lockdown. Breath is therefore about freedom:
“Having space to breathe, or being able to breath freely […] is an aspiration. With breath comes imagination. With breath comes possibility. If queer politics is about freedom, it might simply mean the freedom to breathe” (Ahmed, 2010, p.120).
Finding the space to breathe, and rest, is resistance.
Chloe then charted their encounters with the various constellations of mindfulness, including medicalised, Buddhist, and social mindfulness, to arrive at an invitation to create mindful communities (or cultures) in academic spaces. Here, they argued for the potential of the breath as a collective capacity to resist colonial regimes of time and speed within academic cultures.
For the second session, sport and exercise sciences researcher Jen Airlie shared findings from her PhD on Enhancing physical Activity in Care Homes (REACH). Funded by the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR), the REACH project was based on the premise that older adults living in residential care settings spend (too) much time sedentary and this is detrimental to their health and well-being. In this context, strategies to initiate more movement, more often, were framed as a solution to the ‘problem’ of bodies that stay still for too long (see also Phoenix & Bell, 2019).
Drawing from her ethnographic fieldnotes, and interview data with staff, residents, and their families, Jen discussed how the routinisation of movement in residential care settings was shaped by an ethos of care, the physical environment, and the resident’s needs, abilities and experiences. Quantitative physical activity and sedentary behaviour data illustrated sedentary behaviours as patterned, with prolonged bouts (i.e. greater than 30 min or 60 min) nearly always occurring in the morning compared to the afternoon and evenings. Her discussion highlighted the relational aspects of movement; how some bodies are both moved and stilled by those who care for them.
Curator and researcher Nora Heidorn led our third session, which included working with a small and subjective archive of images of reclined figures from contemporary art, history of medicine, and visual culture, to help collectively gather responses to our original provocation: what is the body doing when it is still?
The pictures from Nora’s ongoing curatorial research project Being Horizontal suggest that slow or still bodies might be resting, posing, undergoing examination, protesting, or producing knowledge together. While the standard enlightenment representation of the human body is of a singular, upright, able-bodied white man (Cavarero, 2016), the workshop prompted the participants to pay caring and critical attention to imagery of reclined and inclined bodies that contest this ideal: what if the average human is dependent, exhausted, temporarily or permanently sick, and, like the residents of the care home, always in relation with others and their environment?
Participants each selected a printed image from a pinboard, reflected individually on what they saw, and then discussed at their tables how they might describe the quality of their gaze onto the picture, for example: caring, sexualising, worrying, medicalising. Despite having been provided with no prior explanation of the images–which were often a still or a snapshot from a larger artistic project or body of work–participants’ engaged and nuanced responses indicated that the pictures “spoke to them”. Reclined figures might return our gazes, aware of being observed, of how we look differently at horizontal bodies than we do an upright counterpart. By complicating our expectations of what “work”, “politics”, or “rest” might mean and look like, many of the artworks challenged the correlating binaries of power/powerlessness and uprightness/horizontality.
And then, to the final provocation of the day. How might rest disrupt capitalist demands of labour and limiting visions of productivity? Here, Arya Thampuran led a guided restorative yoga practice with gentle meditation and somatic movement to bring awareness back into our bodies. Participants were invited to reflect on how it felt to reconnect in an institutional space, where bodies are often put aside for work – through skipped or hasty lunch breaks at desks. We traced the idea of ‘laziness’ as a manufactured construct of capitalism and racism from Puritan thought, enslavement, and Reconstruction Era through tropes of the ‘Mammy figure’ and ‘Welfare Queen’. These figures demonstrate how gendered, racial and sociopolitical anxieties intersect to justify sustained oppression and social stratification: the ‘Mammy’ figure portrays black women as maternal figures content with child-rearing and domestic labour, with the ‘Welfare Queen’ sexualised black women (particularly single parents) as shirking work and living off taxpayers’ contributions with their large families.
Rest was then affirmed and re-politicised as a radical tool of resistance through American performance artist and activist Tricia Hersey’s ‘Nap Ministry’, an organisation that reframes rest as a sacred, politically reparative practice and leads communal napping and meditation. We reflected on how rest can become a collective act of care against the grain of neoliberal self-optimisation. Selina Thompson’s performance art piece, salt, was explored as an example of ritual rest and ‘sitting with’ as a mode of healing in the aftermath of historical trauma. In this piece, Thompson recounts her physical journey through the Atlantic Triangle (retracing geographies of displacement and enslavement) to recover ancestral history and reconfigure healing as a shared, collective journey.
Within the workshop, we collectively and critically examined dominant public health narratives that frame movement as inherently virtuous and stillness as harmful. Sentiments like “sitting is the new smoking” exemplify the moral panic surrounding sedentary behaviour, reinforcing a simplistic equation: more movement equals better health. Within this framing, bodies are expected to constantly perform, optimize, and produce—a perspective that aligns closely with neoliberal and capitalist imperatives of perpetual productivity.
But this view leaves little room for the realities of human need. Contemporary phenomena like quiet quitting—where workers disengage from hustle culture by doing only what their job requires (see Richardson, 2023) —and Gen Z’s embrace of bed rest as a form of healing and protest (sometimes shared on social media with hashtags like #bedrot or #resttok), echo this shift. These practices reflect a growing refusal to internalize productivity as a measure of worth. In both cases, rest is not framed as laziness, but as an intentional act of boundary-setting, recuperation, and quiet defiance in the face of burnout and hyper-performance culture.
In a similar vein, the workshop offered a vital counterpoint to dominant narratives, emphasizing that pausing, resting, and slowing down are not only natural but necessary. These acts support mental health, emotional regulation, and a more sustainable relationship to self and others. Framed this way, rest becomes a form of self-care and resistance—resistance to the pressure to “do more,” to be endlessly efficient, and to manage the body as an individual project of improvement.
Participants reflected on the paradox many of us live: we are told to move more for our health, but not to push too hard; to take care of ourselves, but without disrupting our productivity. In this light, stillness becomes a complex and political space—not just the absence of activity, but a deliberate refusal of certain demands.
Ultimately, the workshop called for a broader, more compassionate understanding of what it means to live well—one that embraces stillness as an essential and transformative part of health, care, movement, and collective life.
Revisit the Polyphony takeover on Moving Bodies
About the authors
Jen Airlie is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Sport and Exercise Sciences at Durham University. Jen works on the Moving Social Work project, leading on a mixed methods evaluation exploring the implementation, effectiveness and potential long-term sustainability of the ‘Moving Social Work’ education programme within English universities.
Chloe Asker is a Research Fellow working with Culture& and the University of Oxford on the Wellcome Discovery Research Platform Antitheses. They also have a curation and creative faciliation practice, working with queer communities on the legacies and histories of Section 28. Read more about Chloe’swork on mindful academic research, and methodologies.
Meridith Griffin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Health, Aging and Society at McMaster University. Her research takes a life course perspective to understand how and why people make choices and engage (or not) in movement-related pursuits and other health-conscious behaviours.
Nora Heidorn is an interdisciplinary researcher, curator, and writer with a background in contemporary art. She investigates the complex politics of health, sexual reproduction, and care through an intersectional feminist lens using curatorial and artistic methods. Her practice-led PhD at the Royal College of Art in London (completed 2025) was funded by AHRC.
Cassandra Phoenix is a Professor in the Department of Sport and Exercise Sciences at Durham University. She leads the Moving Bodies Lab, as part of the Wellcome funded Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities. Cassandra’s research focuses on experiences of movement through menopause and active mobilities.
Arya Thampuran is an Assistant Professor in Black Health and the Humanities in the Narrative Practices Lab (part of the Wellcome funded Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities). Arya is interested in exploring mental health, healing, and embodiment through cross-cultural frameworks beyond a biomedical register.
Emily Tupper is an Assistant Professor in the Moving Bodies Lab (part of the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities) and Department of Sport and Exercise Sciences, at Durham University. Her research focuses on the intersections between the moving body and care practices.
References:
Ahmed, Sarah. 2010. “The Promise of Happiness” Durham, USA. Duke University Press.
Cavarero, Adriana. 2016. “Inclinations: a critique of rectitude” Stanford, USA: Stanford University Press.
McCown, D., Reibel, D. K., & Micozzi, M. S. 2010. “Teaching Mindfulness: A Practical Guide for Clinicians and Educators”. New York USA: Springer Science & Business Media.
McCown, Donald, Reibel, Diane, K., & Micozzi, Marc. S. 2010. “Teaching Mindfulness: A Practical Guide for Clinicians and Educators”, New York USA: Springer Science & Business Media.
Phoenix, Cassandra, and Bell, Sarah. 2019. “Beyond “Move More”: Feeling the rhythms of physical activity in mid and later-life. Social Science & Medicine 231: 47-54.
Richardson, Sydney, D. 2023. “Reimagining Quiet Quitting”, in Making the Entrepreneurial Transition, Understanding the Challenges of Women Entre-Employees, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillian, 105-117.
