Technology, Culture & Public Bio-Pedagogies
Our work in this area focuses on two key, inter-related issues:
The importance of popular culture and the culture industries (and the discourses they produce) in the shaping, molding and education of citizens. Research in this area includes understanding the sporting popular as virulent public, educational, seductive and impactful discourse that convey values, knowledges, and power relations. As such, we centre on the very public, highly educative, potentialities of mediated sporting discourses, events, spectacles, (hi)stories and technologies of corporeal recollection and embodiment, which as powerful public pedagogies become ingrained with discourses of nation, subjectivity, fear, regulation and consumption. We are particularly interested in expanding the tools of ideology critique to include a range of sites in which the production of (sporting) knowledge takes place (including, but not limited to, television, Hollywood films, video games, newspapers, popular magazines, mega-events, new forms of communication technologies, and other forms of commodities, such as social media or gaming technologies).
The processes of learning and learners in relation to the body capturing the interplay between culture forces, social institutions and its impact on (young) people’s embodied identities. Research in this area includes: the relationships between the mediated production of celebrity and youth culture and sport participation; the embracement of new forms of technology to ‘promote’ physical activity; the bio-pedagogies of healthification (such as in cultural technologies such as the Nintendo WII, and software such as Dance Dance Revolution), the recontextualisation of health & body knowledges in schools.
