Science, (Con)spirituality and COVID-19 with Dr Anna Halafoff

New-age spirituality, wellness and alternative health practices
have been cast in a new light as the COVID-19 pandemic has
unfolded. The relationship between these practices and
established or mainstream science and public health has tended to
be an uneasy one, and this unease has only increased during the
pandemic, with online spiritualist and wellness communities
providing fertile ground for the growth and spread of
increasingly anti-establishment and conspiratorial ideas. To
discuss these issues with James and Will is today's guest, Dr
Anna Halafoff, Associate Professor in Sociology at Deakin
University, Melbourne, who explores these issues in the
Australian context. Anna dissects the rise and development of
‘(con)spirituality’ online, the shifting political make-up of
these communities, and how, beyond the pandemic, these
communities and the individuals participating in them can be seen
as responding to the social and economic conditions imposed by
neoliberalism.