This paper argues on behalf of a public pedagogy approach to developing a critical understanding of digital health technologies. It begins by appraising the hitherto polarised articulations of digital innovation as either techno-utopian or techno-dystopian, examining these expectations of technology and considering the tensions between them. It subsequently outlines how a public pedagogy approach can help mediate between these views, offering a more contextualised, socio-political perspective of mHealth. This approach teases out the nuances of digital health by engaging with the complexities of embodied learning. Furthermore, it urges caution against viewing these pedagogical forces as one of transference, or simple governance. To this end, we therefore contextualise our critique of digital health, within an attempt to reconstitute an understanding of public pedagogies of technology.

Social media can become a site of public pedagogy (Rich, E., & Miah, A. (2014). Understanding digital health as public pedagogy: A critical framework. Societies, 4(2), 296–315. doi:10.3390/soc4020296) through which young people learn about health and fitness. Photo and video-sharing social networks are emerging as sites of media practices through which images of the perfect fit body circulate, popularly known as ‘fitspiration’ media. Our research examines how girls and young women negotiate contemporary discourses around body, health and fitness circulating through Instagram and the subjectivities such technology enables. We draw on participatory and collaborative research with young women from three Spanish Secondary schools who each engaged with exercise-related content on Instagram and who self-defined as physically active. Focus groups and semi-structured interviews explored participants’ uses, meanings and influences of this digital content over their embodiment and subjectivities. Through the concept of ‘postfeminist biopedagogy’, we articulate the learning processes that girls experience as they engage with media about ‘fit’ female bodies on Instagram. This involves a series of pedagogical micro practices through which girls learn about the health and fitness subject and which bring together a postfeminist sensibility (Gill, R. (2007). Postfeminist media culture: Elements of a sensibility. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10(2), 147–166. doi:10.1177/1367549407075898), neoliberal notions of the self and discourses of health consumption. A postfeminist biopedagogy (Wright, J. (2009). Biopower, biopedagogies and the obesity epidemic. In J. Wright, & V. Harwood (Eds.), Biopolitics and the ‘obesity epidemic’: Governing bodies (pp. 1–14). New York, NY: Routledge) instructs and regulates girls’ bodies and health subjectivities through a language of choice, empowerment and health although, at the same time, framing exercise as disciplined work to achieve the normative body. Although participants criticized such representation of the perfect body, they considered these normative pressures as necessary to ‘successful’ identities in postfeminist times. Our analysis reveals how some young women learn about exercise as ‘aesthetic labour’ through the biopedagogies circulating on Instagram, with continual work upon the body associated with performing subjectivities which are confident, happy and powerful. We conclude by exploring the implications of our findings for Physical and Health Education and young women’s wellbeing.

In this article, we review critical research on mobile and wearable health technologies focused on the promotion of ‘healthy lifestyles’. We begin by discussing key governmental and policy interests which indicate a shift towards greater digital integration in health care. Subsequently, we review relevant research literature, which highlights concerns about inclusion, social justice, and ownership of mobile health data, which we argue, provoke a series of key sociological questions that are in need of additional investigation. We examine the expansion of what counts as health data, as a basis for advocating the need for greater research into this area. Finally, we consider how digital devices raise questions about the reconfiguration of relationships, behaviours, and concepts of individuality.

Informed by a discourse analysis, this article examines the framing of equity within the UK's digital health policies between 2010 and 2017, focusing on England's development of NHS Digital and its situation within the UK Government's wider digital strategy. Analysis of significant policy documents reveals three interrelated discourses that are engaged within England's digital health policies: equity as a neoliberal imaginary of digital efficiency and empowerment; digital health as a pathway towards democratising health care through data‐sharing, co‐creation and collaboration; and finally, digital health as a route towards extending citizen autonomy through their access to data systems. It advances knowledge of the relationship between digital health policy and health inequalities. Revealing that while inclusion remains a priority area for policymakers, equity is being constituted in ways that reflect broader discourses of neoliberalism, empowerment and the turn to the market for technological solutionism, which may potentially exacerbate health inequalities.

In this paper, we offer a new conceptual approach to analyzing the interrelations between formal and informal pedagogical sites for learning about youth mental (ill) health with a specific focus on digital health technologies. Our approach builds on an understanding of public pedagogy to examine the pedagogical modes of address (^{Ellsworth 1997}) that are (i) produced through ‘expert’ discourses of mental health literacy for young people; and (ii) include digital practices created by young people as they seek to publicly address mental ill health through social media platforms. We trace the pedagogic modes of address that are evident in examples of digital mental health practices and the creation of what we call therapeutic publics. Through an analysis of mental health apps, we examine how these modes of address are implicated in the affective process of learning about mental (ill) health, and the affective arrangements through which embodied distress is rendered culturally intelligible. In doing so, we situate the use of individual mental health apps within a broader digital ecology that is mediated by therapeutic expertise and offer original contributions to the theorization of public pedagogy.

In this paper, I reflect on the numerous contributions of feminist research in helping to frame critical analyses of contemporary health imperatives and their impact on girls’ experiences of their bodies and subjectivities. I then consider recent trends towards the digitisation of girl’s bodies across both formal and informal sites of learning. Digital technologies are increasingly being used in physical and health education to track and monitor young people’s ‘health behaviours’. Evidence is also emerging that digital health technologies, mobile apps, social media and wearable lifestyle technologies are growing in popularity amongst young people but can have potentially far-reaching effects on their health practices, identities and well-being. I argue that new digitised cultures of health and fitness are sites within which gendered pedagogies circulate and reflect a postfeminist sensibility of consumption, surveillance and self-actualisation. I then consider how the proliferation of these technologies and new forms of engagement with the body, inform or challenge gender inequalities. As the title suggests, in terms of gendered norms, digital health technologies can be used to govern bodies and subjectivities but also provide opportunities for resistance; reflecting a postfeminist sensibility but also providing pedagogical possibilities for resistance.