Rethinking digital media literacy to address body dissatisfaction in schools: Lessons from feminist new materialisms

Abstract

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.

Outcomes of a Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial of the SoMe Social Media Literacy Program for Improving Body Image-Related Outcomes in Adolescent Boys and Girls

“…Given the pervasiveness of social media and how engrained it is in the lives of adolescents, it is likely that adolescents may demonstrate some resistance, or not be motivated, to changing their social media habits. Relatedly, scholars have begun to question whether traditional approaches within media literacy interventions can mitigate against social media effects on body dissatisfaction [ 72 ]. Shuilleabhain and colleagues suggest, for example, that while young people may demonstrate an awareness that social media images are edited, this does not necessarily mean that they are able to or have a want to disengage from the desire to achieve such appearances.…”

Understanding digital period pedagogies: Exploring how young people navigate menstruation through embodied experience

“…New materialist theory has also influenced the way in which embodied engagements with digital media are conceptualised (Clark and Thorpe, 2020; Lupton, 2020; Ni Shuilleabhain et al, 2021; Southerton and Clark, 2022). Taking up a vitalist or new materialist perspective when exploring people’s engagements with digital media requires attending to the affective and embodied and relational dimensions of these engagements.…”

“…These learnings and activities take place in ‘formal’ classroom settings and beyond, across multiple settings of daily life. Here, pedagogy and pedagogical practices are conceptualised as ‘embodied, affective and material’ (Ni Shuilleabhain et al, 2021: 4).…”

Digital health education: Critical perspectives

“…In line with this focus on body pedagogies, the way in which digital health education is received and experienced cannot be known in advance and is not just about content, but also concerns the way in which it is assembled and experienced by individuals as learners , often mediated by affective, material and embodied experiences (Ni Shuilleabhain et al, 2021). Rather than being simply ‘transmitted’ and linear, digital health knowledge is actively negotiated and complex.…”