Introduction: Researching Contemporary Wellness Cultures

This book presents research that grapples with contemporary wellness culture, ranging from COVID-19 conspiracy framings (Haw, Thompson and Cover; Smith, Clark and Southerton) to more nebulous invocations of wellness and wellbeing in medical care (Smith, A., et al.). The diversity of contributions to this edited collection reflects the complexity of contemporary wellness cultures, which makes it a rich site of sociological analysis but also a challenging phenomenon to define as it traverses conceptual and disciplinary boundaries.

Wellness has become a mainstream concept, a term easily and abundantly used in popular parlance. The term ‘wellness’ is a contemporary catch-all used to describe practices and discourses related to exercise, diet, ‘fitspiration’, mental health, sexuality and spirituality (Raphael, 2022). Increasingly ideas about, and indicators of, wellness are digitally mediated, and thus exist, in large part, outside of traditional medical settings. Given the increase in wellness advice and practice as a supplement to, or substitute for, mainstream health practice, it is crucial that we understand the role and impact of wellness on individuals’ health practices, and on conceptualisations of health more broadly. Incisive analyses and sociological understandings of how wellness functions as a concept in contemporary Western culture are needed to equip those who might consume, perform and ‘do’ wellness with the critical lens necessary to identify and perhaps circumvent the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing.