The increasing prevalence of body dissatisfaction among young people is now well recognised with much of the existing literature making connections between media imagery and body dissatisfaction. Media literacy-based interventions continue to be rolled out in schools across the global north in an attempt to prevent body dissatisfaction. However, the pervasiveness of digital media in young people’s lives has prompted questions about the adequacy of current theories of media literacy and associated school-based interventions. We explore how feminist theories focused on the affective, material and more-than-human offer different insights into new digital configurations of agency and mediated learning. We reflect on this potential through analysing empirical data from a study involving arts-based workshops in two schools in the South West of England. Our focus on affect and agency as relational and entangled has important implications for theory and practice in school-based body image programmes and media literacy approaches.

The Culture/Nature dualism has supplied post-Enlightenment philosophers, scientists and social scientists with a neat way to set limits on the respective concerns of the social and natural sciences (see Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2013; Fullagar et al., 2019), and has enabled the creation of distinctions between “modern” (read “civilised”) and “traditional” (read “primitive”) bodies and ways of being-in-the-world (Denowski and Viveiros de Castro, 2014). Yet, when critically exploring issues of embodiment, the influence of the built environment on well-being, climate transitions and/or the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic such distinctions start to become problematic, as eloquently argued in the last three decades by feminist, post-human, new-materialist and political ecological –among others– debates and propositions. Giving continuity to an ongoing dialogue started in 2018 between scholars and activists from Latin America and Europe (see Donato, Tonelli, Galak, 2019) this seminar explored how the interrelated domains of health, physical activity, and education can look like from perspectives that de-stabilise established ontological boundaries between nature, culture, the body, and their relationship. It did so through a dialogue between Alessandro Bortolotti, Simone Fullagar, Bruno Mora, Niamh Ni Shuilleabhain, four scholars from Australia, Italy, United Kingdom and Uruguay. The online event took place as the first of a two-parts online seminar series on Re-assembling the nature-culture-body nexus: practices and epistemologies.

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