Body weight is a key concern in contemporary society, with large proportions of the population attempting to control their weight. However, losing weight and maintaining weight loss is notoriously difficult, and new strategies for weight loss attract significant interest. Writing about experiences of weight loss in online journals, or blogging, has recently expanded rapidly. Weight-loss bloggers typically write about daily successes and failures, report calorie consumption and exercise output, and post photographs of their changing bodies. Many bloggers openly court the surveillance of blog readers as a motivation for accountability to their weight-loss goals. Drawing from a sample of weight-loss blogs authored by women, we explore three issues arising from this practice of disclosing a conventionally private activity within an online public domain. First, we examine motivations for blogging, focusing on accountability. Secondly, we consider the online construction of self, exploring how weight-loss bloggers negotiate discourses around fatness, and rework selves as their bodies transform. Finally, we consider the communities of interest that form around weight-loss blogs. This 'blogosphere' provides mutual support for weight loss. However, participating in online social spaces is complicated and bloggers must carefully manage issues of privacy and disclosure.

Australia's 2017 Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse recommended to organizations that children should participate in decisions affecting their lives as a safety standard. While a substantial body of research about children's voices in statutory or out-of-home care now exists, there remains a paucity of research into children's voices in family support services delivered by nongovernment organizations. This is despite the primary service purpose being to benefit children. This lack of focus in family support was identified as a research priority by a nongovernment organization in Queensland, Australia, which lead to a collaborative research programme. This article reports on initial research from a survey study to describe the current state of play from practitioners into their perceptions and practices of children's participation in family support contexts. A voluntary and anonymous online, qualitativepredominate survey was opened to 110 practitioners in family support services, of which 50% responded. The findings identified that children's voices were compromised by perceptions of children's capacity relating to age and vulnerability, the parental focus of the service coupled with perceptions of parent's needs and gatekeeping behaviours and service pressures that work against the conditions required for children's rights to voice.

Writing up qualitative research requires researchers to consider many issues, including the representation of participants, academic standards for scholarship and researcher subjectivity or agency. In this article I refer to Žižek's notion of the ideal love relationship to examine some of the messy processes involved in constructing the written texts of such research. Principally, I describe the loss of authorial voice that occurred in my doctoral thesis following my appropriation of Žižek's post-Lacanian psychoanalytic approach as the methodological framework. In an attempt to untangle the tensions that plagued my use of Žižek's work and convey a sense of their disruptive implications, I adopt a writing style that is intermittently disordered, a voice that is inconsistently empowered and a reflexive engagement that is critically self-conscious. I argue that the negotiation of an academic writing style is an under-acknowledged site of ethical, political and personal struggle that, as such, represents an important methodological concern for feminist researchers.

No abstract

Accessible summary This paper is about older people with learning disabilities who live in the country in Australia. We talked to both individuals and their carers to find out what things helped them they got older, and what things made it harder. These people said that they were well supported by the local community and particularly their doctors. However, many people in this project also reported problems about living in the country such as limited choices and being forced to make decisions they did not like. Abstract Background: Access to support services in rural areas is known to be problematic both in Australia, and in other countries around the world, but the majority of research on the population of people ageing with learning disability has so far focussed on metropolitan residents. The authors report about select aspects of the lived experience of older adults with learning disability resident in rural locations in two states of Australia. Materials and Methods: This pilot project examined data drawn from 34 semi‐structured interviews conducted with 17 older adults and 17 carers. Responses were analysed for thematic areas. Results: It was observed that the capacity of certain rural areas to support meaningful choice‐making was limited due to constraints of access to key services, including community‐based aged care, generic and specialist health services, and both supported disability and aged‐care residential options. Responses indicated that those living in both small‐ and medium‐sized congregate care settings (such as group homes and residential aged‐care facilities) had more limited choices and only partial (if any) control over their living situation. Conclusion: An understanding of the needs of older adults with learning disability resident in rural areas is important to ensure that both aged‐care and disability support structures are built on individuals' needs.