Critically encountering exer-games & young femininity

This article builds upon previous research into the Nintendo Wii game “We Cheer” through qualitative analysis of the lived experiences of young girls and their playing experiences. I argue here that this multi-layered approach is important as it allows for exploration of the nuances between representation and everyday lives, specifically when analyzing the complexity and contradictions related to the girls’ hetero-sexy embodiment and the process of becoming female in a (digital) culture still largely dominated by the sociocultural constitution of slenderness. Throughout the analysis, I aim to demonstrate the way in which the girls’ engagement with “We Cheer” was mediated by their own embodied sensemaking and work on the self. As such, I focus on the partial stories that the girls tell about their own embodied femininities to advance studies of media reception in ways that are arguably unique to interactive exer-games such as “We Cheer.”</jats:p

Embodying Sporty Girlhood: Health and the Enactment of "Successful" Femininities

This paper focuses on young women’s embodiment of health discourses and how these are “played out” in education and sporting contexts where varying physical cultures are enacted. We draw on data from three qualitative projects that considered girls’ understandings of PE, football, and running within the context of their active schooling subjectivities. Health concerns increasingly frame young people’s participation in sport and physical activity and “girls” in particular have been encouraged to be more physically active. Influential “healthism” discourses continue to construct compelling ideas about “active citizenship” as moral responsibility and within broader, fluid and neoliberal societies young women are seen as the “magic bullet” (Ringrose, 2013) to overcome social issues and complex health problems such as obesity. Through critical feminist inquiry into the material-discursive rationalities of healthism in postfeminist times our analysis demonstrates that health and achievement discourses form powerful “body pedagogies” in relation to young women’s engagement with sport and physical activity. The body pedagogies we analysed were multifaceted in that they focused on performative potential of sport and physical activity in the quest for the ever “perfectible self” (McRobbie, 2007, p. 719), and were also imbued with fear, anxiety and risk related to failure and ‘fatness’. These findings are significant as they show that current responses to “tackle” ill health that mobilise sport and physical activity as simplified and rationalised responses to the “threat” of obesity are problematic because they do not contend with this complexity as young women assemble their postfeminist choice biographies

Inequalities in older people: A plan for action

Health inequalities result in poor accessibility to primary, secondary, community and preventative care as well as food sources and other health practices such as exercise and physical activity, across the lifespan1,2. However, globally, we have increasingly ageing population, and the importance of addressing issues related to deprivation in this vulnerable group is crucial. Older people living in deprived communities have reduced access to a range of services, which compromises their health and social-care1. This is often further exacerbated in areas of conflict, political and social unrest.Public Health and Primary Care often adopt top-down approaches, identifying behaviours or individuals as ‘problems’ and developing programmes to target the behaviours or individuals. This can result in programmes that widen rather than reduce inequalities. Our sandpit was designed to explore an evidence-based, bottom-up, community engagement approach3, that enables communities to identify barriers to their health and wellbeing and design sustainable and contextually specific solutions.Our expertise, the urban-rural disparity across GW4 and our global partners uniquely placed us to address the ‘Health, demographic change and wellbeing’ grand challenge and contribute to the GW4 priority areas ‘Inclusive innovative and reflective societies, and ‘Social Justice, Inequality, local and global.’ We worked with research partners in Colombia and Namibia to develop transferable adaptive processes and approaches for these developing countries and the welfare of their older populations.From the outset we identified several key outcomes and benefits from this research sandpit:• To be in a position to inform responses to local, national and international grand challenges to create inclusive communities and promote social justice.• To be in a position to inform government programmes for improving health inequalities of older people.• To develop a, network of researchers, community members and service providers, who can cogenerate ‘community engagement’ approaches, that are underutilised.The focus of our application was to identify new approaches and ways of addressing inequalities in health among older people living in low income / economically disadvantaged communities. In particular we wanted to maximise a community-development, bottom-up approach that is evidenced to have positive effects on health behaviours, health consequences and self-efficacy2. This also aligns with the Healthy Living theme proposed in the GW4, 5-year strategy3.AimTo identify new approaches, based on bottom-up approaches, to address inequalities in health among older people, living in low income and economically disadvantaged communities.6Objectives- Design and deliver a 2-day, international, residential sandpit- Create a network and data base of expertise, including academic, professional and local community members, with expertise in inequalities in older people, from across the GW4 locality and from the two DAC countries of Colombia and Namibia- Form a platform to develop community lead public health education health initiatives, identified by the local communities.- Develop one-two potential research projects in readiness for any future, related calls.How the funds were used ?Funding supported a 2-day, residential sandpit called: ‘Health inequalities in older people: a plan for action’. This was facilitated by a professional facilitator to enable us to achieve our aim and outcomes and ensured that we maximised our productivity. Attendees included stakeholders from relevant service providers and community members as well as academics with expertise in health inequalities in older people. This combined expertise and experience ensured that collective ideas and approaches were focused on grounding any project within the lived experience of economically disadvantaged communities.To advertise the event we designed a poster promoting the two-day, international, residential sandpit titled ‘Inequalities in older people: A plan for action’ (appendix 1). We emailed this to selected, potential delegates from stakeholder organisations, including service providers, community members and academics with expertise in health inequalities in older people, throughout the GW4 locality. We included a link on the poster taking interested applicants to an on-line registration page that we created using the Bristol on-line Survey system (BOS). The application form also asked potential delegates to provide details about their areas of expertise and to state whether they were happy for these to be placed on our database. In addition, we included a draft programme for the event.Approximately three-weeks before the event we circulated a document providing pen portraits from each of the GW4 leads involved in the original application (appendix 2). In the final two weeks prior to the event communication was maintained between organisers and potential delegates and important information, such as the programme for the sandpit was provided (figure 1).The residential 2-day sandpit took place at the Novotel, Victoria Street, Bristol. This was a central location in Bristol. It was a 5-minute walk from the main railway station and on major bus routes. Parking was provided for all delegates, by the hotel, if required

Remembering learning to play:reworking gendered memories of sport, physical activity, and movement

In this article, we explore young women’s memories of their experiences with sport, physical activity, and play during their childhood. Through collective memory work – sharing, discussing, writing, and analysing sporting memories/histories – we examine (re)constructions of young women’s experiences of gendered relations of power, bodily awareness, and regulation within movement-based practices. The approach taken explores relationships between theory and method, a feature of post- qualitative inquiry. Forming a collaborative memory workshop with six young women (aged 19–22) and two researchers, we illustrate how work-ing memories facilitates the interrogation of taken-for-granted assump-tions about women’s active bodies. Represented through two memories in this paper, their production, representation, and analysis were a collaborative effort, not solely representative of two individual experi-ences. Despite growing up within a period wherein women’s access to and engagement with sport and physical activity is more available, com-mon, and diverse compared to the youth of past generations, young women’s experiences explored here illustrate the ways in which move-ment-based practices are located within the confluence of postfeminist sensibilities including, intensely scrutinised gendered body cultures, potent neoliberal configurations, and discourses of empowerment. It is these new sporting and active femininities and the gendering experiences of physical culture that are explored within this paper through memory work and collective biograph

Physical cultures of stigmatisation:health policy &amp; social class

In recent years, the increasing regulation of people's health and bodies has been exacerbated by a contemporary ‘obesity discourse’ centred on eating less, exercising more and losing weight. This paper contributes to the growing body of work critically examining this discourse and highlights the way physical activity and health policy directed at ‘tackling’ the obesity ‘crisis’ in the UK articulates numerous powerful discourses that operate to legitimise and privilege certain ways of knowing and usher forth certain desirable forms of embodiment. This has given greater impetus to further define the role of physical activity, sport and physical education as instruments for addressing public health agendas. It is argued that these policies have particular implications for social class through their constitution of (un)healthy and (in)active ‘working class’ bodies. One of the most powerful forms of stigmatisation and discrimination circulating within contemporary health emerges when the social and cultural tensions of social class intersect with obesity discourse and its accompanying imperatives related to physical activity and diet. This raises some important questions about the future of sport and physical activity as it is shaped by the politics of broader health agendas and our position within this terrain as ‘critics’. Consequently, the latter part of the paper offers reflections on the nature and utility of our (and others’) social science critique in the politics of obesity and articulates the need for crossing disciplinary and sectoral borders. </jats:p

Digital Ecologies of Youth Mental Health: Apps, Therapeutic Publics and Pedagogy as Affective Arrangements

In this paper, we offer a new conceptual approach to analyzing the interrelations between formal and informal pedagogical sites for learning about youth mental (ill) health with a specific focus on digital health technologies. Our approach builds on an understanding of public pedagogy to examine the pedagogical modes of address (Ellsworth 1997) that are (i) produced through 'expert' discourses of mental health literacy for young people; and (ii) include digital practices created by young people as they seek to publicly address mental ill health through social media platforms. We trace the pedagogic modes of address that are evident in examples of digital mental health practices and the creation of what we call therapeutic publics. Through an analysis of mental health apps, we examine how these modes of address are implicated in the affective process of learning about mental (ill) health, and the affective arrangements through which embodied distress is rendered culturally intelligible. In doing so, we situate the use of individual mental health apps within a broader digital ecology that is mediated by therapeutic expertise and offer original contributions to the theorization of public pedagogy