‘Up against Whiteness’: rethinking race and the body in a global era

Abstract

While ethnic-minority young people are increasingly defined as bodies ‘at disadvantage', marked as less fit or less healthy than the White ‘norm', the ways young people construct meanings around their bodies as a result of global health imperatives have received scant attention. The purpose of this participatory visual research was to incorporate an interactive, multimedia Body Curriculum into two fitness units in secondary urban schools to assist ethnic-minority young people in critically responding to pervasive media monocultural representations of fit bodies. Students’ engagement with Glogster (a creative visual learning platform) not only enabled them to criticize fitness as a ‘White thing,' but also offered them a pedagogical space to challenge such racialized and gendered media narratives with self-representations.