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Are we fit yet? English adolescent girls' experiences of health and fitness appsWord count: 7469 In recent years, society has witnessed a proliferation of digital technologies facilitate new ways to monitor young people's health. This paper explores a group of English adolescent girls' understandings of 'health' promoted by health and fitness related technologies. Five focus group meetings with the same eight girls, aged between fourteen and seventeen, were conducted to explore their experiences of using health and fitness apps. The girls' understandings of the digitised body are examined through a Foucauldian lens, with particular attention to conceptualisations of bio-power and technologies of the self. The data reveals how the girls negotiated, and at times critiqued, the multiple health discourses that are manifest through digital health technologies and performative health culture. The results emphasise that individual-based applications (apps) remove the social and interactive elements of physical activity valued by the girls. This research highlights the possibilities digital technologies provide for health promotion, yet also illuminates the limitations of these technologies if used uncritically and inappropriately.

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This chapter thinks through the possibilities and challenges posed by Co-Creation as a knowledge practice that is more than a ‘novel method’ for addressing urban inequality. We consider the onto-ethico-epistemological assumptions that underpin the ‘doing’ of co-creation as inventive practice. Drawing upon Barad (2007), Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and post-qualitative scholars (St Pierre, 2011), we ask what claims are made about participatory approaches in voicing issues of marginalisation? How are human and non-human relations recognised in creative collaborations? What role does affect play in the micropolitics of working with different desires, bodies, and techniques to effect change? New materialism offers a useful orientation to thinking through Co-Creation as a material-discursive process that has a rhizomatic, rather than linear form. Moving beyond humanist assumptions about individual creativity and essentialised identity categories, Co-Creation can be understood as a research assemblage that brings into relation objects, desires, bodies and contexts to disrupt, queer, reimagine and contest the normative (e.g. stigmatising of groups and places, and the invisibility of privileged perspectives). Using examples from our own and others’ work we explore the complex processes of Co-Creation projects, as they bring together artists, academics and communities in the face of urban inequality and marginalisation.

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