Abstract: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.

Based on research with middle-upper class 12-13-year-old school girls, we discuss how femininities were embodied and discursively reconstructed in class-based ways. The data suggests the girls understood class antagonisms within the boundaries of neoliberal discourses of responsibilization, self-discipline, self-worth, and 'proper' conduct and choices. With social class stripped of any structural or structuring properties, instead imparted to the fleshy sinews of the (excessive) body, the data reveals how social class was made visible and manifest in various mechanisms of, and meanings about, inclusion, exclusion, pathology and normalization. Thus, in explicating the ways in which the school girls embodied middle-upper class femininity (as the epitome of localized and everyday neoliberalism) we highlight how, in turn, 'others' ('chavs') were pathologized and deemed in need of regulation, management and governance.

This chapter details the significance and relevance of a critical engagement with post-, neoliberal and popular feminist discourses to studies of the female moving body, sport and fitness. It establishes a framework through which to approach emerging writing in this field by evaluating how feminist critiques of postfeminism, neoliberal feminism and popular feminisms can transform and reorient established paradigms through which sporting femininity has been traditionally theorised. It outlines the utility of these approaches for feminists seeking to respond to the cultural conditions under which athletic women and girls come to understand and engage in physical activity and the sporting domain, and reflects on the impacts of postfeminist and neoliberal paradigms on the enactment of gender power and politics in sporting and fitness contexts.

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.

Academic, policy, and public concerns are intensifying around how to respond to increasing mental health problems amongst young people in OECD countries such as the UK and Australia. In this paper we make the case that public knowledge about mental health promotion, help-seeking, support and recovery can be understood as an enactment of public pedagogy-as knowledge practices and processes that are produced within and beyond formal spaces of learning. We explore the question of how new pedagogic modes of address are produced through digital technologies-social media, gamified therapies, e-mental health literacy, wearable technology-as they invite particular ways of knowing embodied distress as "mental illness or ill health." The rapid growth of formal and informal pedagogical sites for learning about youth mental health raises questions about the affective arrangements that produce new kinds of (ab)normal in the digital era. Through a posthumanist perspective that connects critical mental health studies and public pedagogy, this paper offers an original contribution that theorises pedagogic sites within the cultural formation of public-personal knowledge about mental (ill) health.