Bodies of Media Education – Towards Digital Pedagogies of Feeling

University of Eastern Finland DRDHum 2024 Conference Submission21 Authors

Keywords: digital pedagogy, self-shooting, feeling, corporeality, body image

TL;DR: The paper introduces my forthcoming postdoc project Bodies of Media Education discussing its objectives, methodological approaches, and theoretical baselines.

Abstract:

This paper discusses the starting points of the forthcoming postdoc project Bodies of Media Education – Towards Digital Pedagogies of Feeling (BoME). The paper introduces the project’s objectives, methodological approaches, and theoretical baselines. BoME’s aim is to develop new approaches to studying the relationship between visual culture and bodies through analyzing self-shooting, the digital practice of creating selfies and other still and moving images of oneself, as a digital pedagogy of feeling. Drawing on four bodies of work – social media studies; scholarship on media education; feminist, queer, fat studies and disability studies theories of corporeality; and theorizations of affect – BoME analyses the dynamics, values, limits, and rules of self-shooting as a vehicle of exploration of one’s body and its feelings. The project hypothesizes that digital pedagogies of feeling afford breakthroughs in theorizations of the body’s relation to the media and visual culture.

BoME asks what kinds of information the corporeal practices of self-shooting produce and how this information helps media users to navigate the digital landscapes of body ideals. To answer this question, it explores media education and self-shooting practices from the viewpoint of subjects often deemed “the most vulnerable” to body ideals – teenagers and young people, but also adults taking part in body positive activities and struggling with their body image. BoME examines media education resources offered by Finnish and European organizations, interview materials with teenagers and educators on the experiences of media education on body ideals, and ethnographic materials gathered at body positive photography meetups. Through combining textual analysis and close reading practices with conceptual analysis, interviews, and ethnographic observation, BoME pushes for creative methodologies for unravelling the co-constructive nature of bodies and images. The project coins the term digital pedagogies of feeling to map the role of digital devices as instruments for “feeling one’s body” in media education. In this way, BoME builds ground to a novel approach for studying visual digital cultures as corporeal practices.

Submission Number: 21