Aristea Fotopoulou

Training to self-care: fitness tracking, biopedagogy and the healthy consumer

ABSTRACT In this article, we provide an account of Fitbit, a wearable sensor device, using two complementary analytical approaches: auto-ethnography and media analysis. Drawing on the concept of biopedagogy, which describes the processes of learning and training bodies how to live, we focus on how users learn to self-care with wearable technologies through a series of micropractices that involve processes of mediation and the sharing of their own data via social networking. Our discussion is oriented towards four areas of analysis: data subjectivity and sociality; making meaning; time and productivity and brand identity. We articulate how these micropractices of knowing one’s body regulate the contemporary ‘fit’ and healthy subject, and mediate expertise about health, behaviour and data subjectivity.

News in the community?: Investigating emerging inter-local spaces of news production/consumption

This article examines the emergence of new, inter-local spaces of news production and consumption, drawing on extensive fieldwork and interviews with community reporters trained by a community reporter organisation based in the north of England. Practices of news production and content generation are focused on peoples own communities and they are underpinned by an ethos of production, which is grounded in a critical consumption of news and collective processes of skill acquisition. Through an analysis of motivations and practices, we account for the values that sustain community reporter communities and discuss how such practices, while emerging from the place of local community, also extend across wider communities of interest. It is suggested that an evolving practice of skill sharing and mutual recognition could potentially stimulate the regrowth of democratic values.

The first bite: Imaginaries, promotional publics and the laboratory grown burger

In this article, we analyse a 2013 press conference hosting the world’s first tasting of a laboratory grown hamburger. We explore this as a media event: an exceptional performative moment in which common meanings are mobilised and a connection to a shared centre of reality is offered. We develop our own theoretical contribution – the promotional public – to characterise the affirmative and partial patchwork of carefully selected actors invoked during the burger tasting. Our account draws on three areas of analysis: interview data with the scientists who developed the burger, media analysis of the streamed press conference itself and media analysis of social media during and following the event. We argue that the call to witness an experiment is a form of promotion and that such promotional material also offers an address that invokes a public with its attendant tensions.

Digital and networked by default? Women’s organisations and the social imaginary of networked feminism

This article analyses the social imaginary of ‘networked feminism’ as an ideological construct of legitimate political engagement, drawing on ethnographic study conducted with London-based women’s organisations. For many women’s groups, the desire to connect echoes libertarian visions of Web 2.0 as an ‘open’ and ‘shared’ space, and it is encouraged by widely circulating governmental narratives of digital inclusion. In the context of public services becoming digital by default, and severe funding cuts to volunteer organisations in the United Kingdom, feminist organisations are invited to revise the allocation of resources, in order to best accommodate the setting up of digital platforms, and at the same time, to maintain their political and social aims. It is argued that there are tensions between the imaginaries of a ‘digital sisterhood’ and the material realities of women’s organisations: age, lack of resources and media literacy were found to be the three most important factors that modulate participation, and in many cases become new types of exclusions of access to publicity and recognition. By interrogating the circulation of dominant liberal narratives of digital engagement and digital inclusion that motivate new communicative practices between many feminist organisations today, the article offers a fuller understanding of networked media and activism for social justice.

Constructing a digital storycircle: digital infrastructure and mutual recognition

Building on the principles of the digital storytelling movement, this article asks whether the narrative exchange within the ‘storycircles’ of storymakers created in face-to-face workshops can be further replicated by drawing on digital infrastructure in specific ways. It addresses this question by reporting on the successes and limitations of a five-stream project of funded action research with partners in north-west England that explored the contribution of digital infrastructure to processes of narrative exchange and the wider processes of mutual recognition that flow from narrative exchange. Three main dimensions of a digital storycircle are explored: multiplications, spatializations (or the building of narratives around sets of individual narratives), and habits of mutual recognition. Limitations relate to the factors of time, and levels of digital development and basic digital access.

Telling the story of the stories: online content curation and digital engagement

This article explores tensions between the imaginaries and material hindrances that accompany the development of digital infrastructures for narrative exchange and public engagement. Digital infrastructures allow civil society organizations to become narrators of their community lives, and to express solidarity and recognition. Often full development and implementation of such infrastructures result in drastic changes to an organizations mode of operation. Drawing from empirical material collected during an action research project with an organization of community reporters in the North of England, here we examine the visions of ‘telling the story of the stories’ that motivated such changes, the experiments in web analytics and content curation that in practice realized these visions and the socio-economic contexts that constrained them. We attend to the wider social imaginaries about the digital as they help us understand better how social actors construct the worlds they want to inhabit within information society through mundane everyday practices. Examining how perceptions of digital engagement translate into such concrete practices is necessary in order to gain insight into the ways in which material infrastructures, such as resources and technologies, intertwine with social and cultural expectations about how life should be with digital technologies.

Expertise A report and a manifesto

This article explores the stakes of digital transformation through a consideration of digital expertise. Expertise is investigated as it operates in everyday situations – drawing on empirical research undertaken in Brighton, UK, as part of the Communities and Cultures Network+ project. It is also deployed as a heuristic for inquiry into questions of use and the policy of use and investigated in relation to questions of automation that provoke reconsideration of the role of humans and machines in circuits of expertise. This latter necessitates reconsideration of how expertise can be theorized, and this is developed through an account that insists on the importance of both the material and the circulating imaginary for understanding the operations of digital expertise. Drawing these together to develop a new understanding of the economy of digital expertise, inspiration is finally drawn from earlier attempts to develop new models of technological expertise in the context of public science, undertaken with the specific intent of contributing to furthering the democratization of knowledge. In this article too, expertise is invoked albeit in a rather different way as constituting the grounds for the development of a political demand. The article closes with a question concerning the stakes of a demand for digital expertise.This article explores the stakes of digital transformation through a consideration of digital expertise. Expertise is investigated as it operates in everyday situations – drawing on empirical resea...

Remediating Politics: Brand(ed) New Sexualities and Real Bodies Online

This article suggests that, in a world emerging in and through mediation, branded sex bloggers and portals become (re)mediators of queer and feminist politics. It examines the websites of two porn production companies, Nofauxxx and Furry Girl, and analyses how they respond to older media forms, re-articulate long-standing debates about pornography in new mediated environments, and re-signify the pornographic object. Key in this process is the circulation of “authenticity,” “real bodies,” and “diversity” discourses. Through this circulation, sex blogger/brand portals mediate models of queer and feminist political engagement entrenched with notions of digital networks and free markets more generally.

From Egg Donation to Fertility Apps: Feminist Knowledge Production and Reproductive Rights

This chapter revisits the concept of networked feminism within the wider context of debates in contemporary feminism about forms of gendered and reproductive labour (Dickenson, 2007; Franklin and Lock, 2003; Thompson, 2005). I turn here to account for feminist projects of knowledge production about reproductive technologies and their regulation in digital media, focusing specifically on the example of fertility policy around egg donation and fertility tracking with smart technologies. The significance of reproductive labour for global capitalism, and the biodigital vulnerabilities that are created in relation to reproductive technologies are my key interests in this discussion. Reproductive labour and the changes in the political economy of reproduction brought by new reproductive technologies, such as in-vitro fertilisation and egg extraction, are controversial issues that have invited numerous feminist interventions around the world. A conceptualisation of gendered labour is vital for an understanding of the reconfigurations of the ‘political’ in our digitally mediated worlds. Second, I move on to analyse the communicative acts that contribute to a layperson’s knowledge production about reproductive rights, and note how these cut across academic/grassroots, online/offline, and national/local spaces, whilst challenging these boundaries. Feminist networks attempt to create alternative but credible sources of knowledge that question dominant understandings of biomedicine and its policy. My examination shows how these actors establish their credibility and how their participation in mainstream digital media legitimises them as representatives of affected groups in society. The central preoccupation with subjective experience and seizing control over one’s body in contemporary feminist mobilisations indicates continuity with the Women’s Health Movement. As with the other chapters in this book, there are deep contradictions that characterise feminist politics of reproduction, as neoliberal discourses of individual choice, sexual agency and empowerment shape the conditions in which they emerge. I argue that these politics can be better understood in relation to embodied, material practices of knowledge production, mutual learning and self-experimentation with digital media and smart technologies.

Introduction: Conceptualising Feminist Activism and Digital Networks

This chapter introduces the key focus of the book: the contradictions, tensions, and often-paradoxical aspects of feminist and queer politics in a digital world of dense connections. How can feminism and queer activism articulate a political response to the new forms of governmentality that result from digital technologies, while using these same technologies in order to circulate their counter-narratives and inhabit their versions of the world? By crossing through the themes of bodily autonomy, pornography, reproduction, and queer social life, I visit some of the inherent contradictions of this political project and stress that, between empowerment and vulnerability, feminism remains today a necessary and passionate struggle for social justice. The Introductory Chapter clarifies some of the key theoretical premises of the book and introduces two key interdisciplinary analytical tools for future research, by drawing critically from existing innovative research in the fields of media theory, political science and feminist science, and technology studies. The chapter outlines the book’s general approach to the question of materiality, and its emphasis on the material, social and embodied aspects of digital media technologies and activist practices. First it analyses how the notions of labour and communicative practice are central aspects of materiality in relation to the digital, which shape the very conditions of political organising, and how we understand what it means to be political as feminists. Then, it highlights theoretical work that challenges representationalism by looking at the ideas of, amongst others, Tiziana Terranova (2004), Hardt and Negri (2000), and Jodie Dean (2009); then, it moves on to examine ‘posthumanist performativity’ (Barad, 2007) as a way of thinking about embodiment in digital networks beyond the matter/representation binary. Through this exploration, the chapter introduces the concept of biodigital vulnerability, which positions vulnerability as a precondition for enabling feminist and queer political subjectivity.