Embodied display: A critical examination of the biopedagogical experience of wearing health

The social spaces of hearing apps: problems, partners and intermediaries

“…Recent traditions of qualitative research focusing on cultures and ways of doing things have emphasised the advantages of 'at home' research (e.g. Järventie-Thesleff et al, 2016;Morriss, 2016;Taylor, 2011;Ward et al, 2018). Morriss (2016), for instance, points out the ways in which insider research offers opportunities to document in a rich and detailed manner professional practices and ways of thinking that might not be articulated to strangers.…”

“…Far from simply targeting self-managing individual health consumers, each of the apps we consider here is deployed within or is marketed through particular physical and social environments and the relationships occurring within those spaces: for instance, between parents and children or teachers and students. While there has been some commentary on the ways in which the meanings of health apps might be mediated or even resisted through relationships (Rich and Miah, 2014) or communities of practice (Ward, 2018), there has been little detailed critical analysis of health apps that achieve their ends through social interactions and located relationships; with the important exception of discussions of commodification and sharing of data. This absence in the critical literature is problematic given that clinicians often see information technology (IT) solutions as best playing out within relationships -for example, as a route to shared decisionmaking with consumers.…”

Configuring the body as pedagogical site: towards a conceptual tool to unpack and situate multiple ontologies of the body in self-tracking apps

“…The field of digital health and education uses the concept of 'biopedagogies' to refer to the pedagogies by which a learner's body is turned into an object of intervention that needs to be made 'fit' (Azzarito 2009;Rail and Jette 2021;Williamson 2015) -an ideal body epitomized by 'efficiency, productivity, and beauty ideals' and juxtaposed against the 'fat or "bad" body', characterized by 'laziness, gluttony, and lack of control' (Azzarito 2009, 192). While earlier studies using a biopedagogical lens have primarily focused on rhetorical strategies used in public health discourses to promote fit bodies, more recent studies, and particularly studies on fitness-tracking apps, have started to offer accounts of the ways self-tracking users might resist or negotiate representations of the 'idealized body' embedded in these technologies (Depper and Howe 2017;Fotopoulou and O'Riordan 2017;Ward et al 2018). However, users' experiences have mainly been viewed as a 'response ' (i.e., accept, resist, negotiate) to representations of the 'healthy body', thereby overlooking other ways users engage and live with their self-tracked data.…”