Reimagining health and fitness materials: an affective inquiry into collaging

Abstract

This paper, or ‘experiment,’ draws on data from a health and fitness scrapbooking project with four Black and Latinx youth. While the data are part of a longer 18-month visual ethnography (Pink, 2013), the focus here began to consider one week of the project in which the four youth and I interacted with health and fitness related magazines. In that week, we created magazine re-assemblages in our scrapbooks. To reimagine what ‘matters’ for education research and pedagogical practices in health, fitness and physical culture, I re-visited data (Levy, Halse & Wright, 2016) through an affective lens (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), drawing on PhEmaterialism (Ringrose, Warfield & Zarbadi, 2019). The affective lens produced a collage inquiry entangled with doubt (Holbrook & Pourchier, 2014), wonder (MacLure, 2013a) and slowness (Renold, 2018), which began to open up possibilities to think-see-feel my way through the data and the process differently.