Background and purpose: Discourses around fitness lifestyles have been powerfully introduced in popular media with Social Networking Sites (SNS), such as Instagram, being relevant sites of public pedagogies (Rich & Miah... [ view full abstract ]
Background and purpose: Discourses around fitness lifestyles have been powerfully introduced in popular media with Social Networking Sites (SNS), such as Instagram, being relevant sites of public pedagogies (Rich & Miah 2014). The purpose of the present study is to understand how adolescent girls perceive, adjust or resist dominant normative discourses regarding the female construction of being fit in the digital environment and the impact of these discourses on their gender identity as physically active girls.
Method: It is an ongoing exploratory study that uses a mixed methodology. Participants are physically active girls that meet a set of requirements that aim to verify familiarity with the fitness Instagram environment. Data are obtained from various focus-group meetings with two groups of girls in a Secondary Education school. To engage adolescents in critical and rich conversation about the research topic, task-orientated activities will be used. The study considers ethical issues in researching young people and social media.
Results: Data analysis will be focused on giving voices to those young girls interacting with these digital spaces. It tries to unveil how they negotiate, criticize or reproduce the discourses about the thin, fit, white and sexy healthy female body on social media, within the broad context of our consumerist and celebrity culture. To discuss our results, we will use different critical theoretical analytic tools such as post-feminism, bio-pedagogies, surveillance and self-representation.
Conclusions:The results obtained will be a valuable tool for analyzing and reflecting upon the SNS as popular pedagogic sites of learning about health, body and gender, and the urgent need for the formal learning spaces, such as PE, to take this tendency into account. The future potential directions that this research opens up will also be highlighted.
Rich, E., & Miah, A. (2014). Understanding Digital Health as Public Pedagogy: A Critical Framework. Societies,4(2),296-315.
