Working hard on the outside: a multimodal critical discourse analysis of The Biggest Loser Australia

The Biggest Loser (TBL) is a reality television weight-loss programme that positions itself as a response to the so-called “obesity crisis”. Research on TBL has thus far focussed on audience responses and its effect on viewers’ beliefs about weight loss. This article focuses instead on how meaning is constructed in TBL. We conducted a multimodal critical discourse analysis of a key episode of TBL (the 2012 Australian season finale) to examine how the textual, visual and auditory elements combine to construct meanings beyond the ostensible health messages. Although the overt message is that all contestants have worked hard, turned their lives around and been “successful”, examination of editing choices, lighting and colour, clothing and time spent on contestants allows us to see that the programme constructs varying degrees of success between contestants and provides accounts for these differences in outcomes. In this way the programme is able to present itself as a putative celebration of all contestants while prescribing narrow limits around what constitutes success. TBL reinforces an ideology in which “success” is a direct result of “the work” of weight loss (both physical and emotional), which can apparently be read straightforwardly off the body. TBL’s “celebration” of weight loss thus reproduces and strengthens the widespread view of fat bodies as physical manifestations of individual (ir)responsibility and psychological dysfunction, and contributes to the ongoing stigmatisation of obesity

Resilience, apps and reluctant individualism: Technologies of self in the neoliberal academy

This paper is concerned with the deep crisis affecting universities, as large scale institutional and structural transformations produce a psychosocial and somatic catastrophe amongst academics (and other university workers) that manifests in experiences of chronic stress, anxiety, exhaustion, insomnia and spiralling rates of physical and mental illness. Elsewhere these have been discussed as the 'hidden injuries of the neoliberal university' (Gill, 2010), highlighting the ways in which such experiences are simultaneously acknowledged and recognised by university staff, yet silenced and exorcised from formal spaces of the contemporary academy and without 'proper channels' of expression - being the subject of conference coffee breaks but not keynotes, of after seminar drinks but not departmental meetings, committee minutes or Senate or Council documentation. For future historians seeking to understand through such official records something about the texture of experience of current academic life, the archives will offer no insights.However, in the last few years, this paper suggests, such injuries have moved from being almost completely silenced within universities to becoming the subject of a variety of new spaces and services designed with 'academics in crisis' at their heart. These include the rolling out of 'well-being' services within universities of programmes for stress management, mindfulness and resilience, the development of new 'apps' designed for busy or overworked people, and the rapidly expanding blogosphere which has become a key site for 'naming' and sharing such experiences of distress/injury. The paper looks critically at these three sites. It argues that whilst they recognise at least some aspects of the subjective experience of contemporary academic labouring, they remain locked into a profoundly individualist framework that turns away from systemic or collective politics to offer instead a set of individualised tools by which to 'cope' with the strains of the neoliberal academy

“I Don't Really Want to Be Associated With the Self-Righteous Left Extreme”: Disincentives to Participation in Collective Action

This paper considers collective action non-participation by people sympathetic but not committed to participating in actions for social change (‘sympathisers’). We conducted a thematic analysis of open-ended written accounts of the barriers to participating in sustained collective action (N = 112), finding that people can be reluctant to engage in some types of collective action. Participants wrote about the potential for detrimental consequences resulting from association with ‘protesters’, concern that they may be undermined by ‘extreme’ fringes of a movement, ambivalence about the visible performance of group normative behaviours (specifically, protesting), and trepidation about ‘loss of self’ within a group. We discuss the findings in relation to theory on social (dis)identification, social (dis)incentives, and identity performances, arguing that inaction does not necessarily stem from apathy. Rather, people may engage in motivated inaction – that is, active avoidance of some types of actions, or from affiliations with particular groups, as a response to negative inferences about the legitimacy or efficacy of some forms of collective action. Practical strategies are suggested for groups and individuals, including the potential for people to take actions for social change independently of a formally organised movement

“I Don't Really Want to Be Associated With the Self-Righteous Left Extreme”: Disincentives to Participation in Collective Action

This paper considers collective action non-participation by people sympathetic but not committed to participating in actions for social change (‘sympathisers’). We conducted a thematic analysis of open-ended written accounts of the barriers to participating in sustained collective action (N = 112), finding that people can be reluctant to engage in some types of collective action. Participants wrote about the potential for detrimental consequences resulting from association with ‘protesters’, concern that they may be undermined by ‘extreme’ fringes of a movement, ambivalence about the visible performance of group normative behaviours (specifically, protesting), and trepidation about ‘loss of self’ within a group. We discuss the findings in relation to theory on social (dis)identification, social (dis)incentives, and identity performances, arguing that inaction does not necessarily stem from apathy. Rather, people may engage in motivated inaction – that is, active avoidance of some types of actions, or from affiliations with particular groups, as a response to negative inferences about the legitimacy or efficacy of some forms of collective action. Practical strategies are suggested for groups and individuals, including the potential for people to take actions for social change independently of a formally organised movement

The ways that people talk about natural resources: Discursive strategies as barriers to environmentally sustainable practices

In this paper, we analyse talk about water and energy use taken from nine interviews with citizens of Perth, Western Australia. Participants\u27 talk offered representations of water as a scarce, shared, natural resource that must not be wasted, whereas talk about energy use focused on the environmental impacts of different technologies for generating electricity, rather than on energy as a consumable resource. Participants accounted for their water-use habits by positioning themselves as caught between a personal desire to conserve water and an (incompatible) social obligation to maintain the appearance of their gardens in keeping with the aesthetic appeal of the suburbs in which they lived. We identify several discursive strategies by which people construct the environmental impact of their actions as minimal or unavoidable. These constitute a barrier to the promotion of more environmentally sustainable practices. Potential implications for environmental policy development are discussed, as are the wider issues associated with the development of ‘applied’ discourse analysis

'What you look like is such a big factor': Girls' own reflections about the appearance culture in an all-girls' school

High school is a key venue for the development and expression of body image concerns in adolescent girls. Researchers have begun to investigate the role of school-based 'appearance cultures' in magnifying the body image concerns of students. To date, however, no research has examined girls' experience as participants within these cultures, and thus the opportunity to learn how girls account for the development and maintenance of these cultures has been missed. In interviews with nine girls attending an all-girls' school, the existence of a strong 'appearance culture' in the school was identified as a major influence on the body image concerns of students. Girls talked about the ways in which appearance-focused conversations, dieting, and weight monitoring occurred as part of the everyday interaction with friends and peers at school. They also identified many ways in which their school attempted to address body image concerns, although these attempts were often portrayed as ineffective, if not counter-productive. These findings suggest that attempts to address the body image concerns of students will need to be sensitive to the lived reality of appearance cultures within schools. © The Author(s) 2010