The idea to join FORTHEM academics and students to explore body positivity was first proposed by University of Opole in January 2022. After an international team of collaborators was assembled, an engagement project was developed. It won funding through FORTHEM share-funding call in March.
Objectives
This project aims at encouraging young people, who tend to be the most vulnerable to body shaming, to see through the constructed nature of mediated body imagery. It raises their awareness of media trends that call for undue attention to body esthetics understood in a very narrow way. This project targets young media-users both in the school system and in the university and is in line with recent initiatives devoted to mental well-being and public health of digital natives. It aims to showcase recent body positive trends and expose the commercial nature of mediated and actual body shaming, as well as the social pressures on slim body.
Team
The core project team consists of academics who approach the theme of body representations from a variety of disciplinary perspectives – media and communication studies, cultural studies, psychology, education and teacher training. It includes Prof. Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska (UO, Department of English) Dr. Mateusz Szubert (UO, Department of Cultural Studies), Prof. María Roncero (UV, Faculty of Psychology), Prof. Gemma García-Soriano Roncero (UV, Faculty of Psychology), Dr. Juan Carlos Casañ-Núñez (UV, Department of Language and Literature Education, Faculty of Teacher Education), as well as BA and MA students in a range of courses.
Student involvement and outreach
The project is designed to involve students in working on topics they care for because they are a part of their experience. It requires doing something for the society beyond the academic community. For example, UO MA student of Liberal Arts Michalina Barczyk has developed a presentation "Social media and unrealistic standards of beauty: Instagram celebrities and the shaping of the body images of adolescent women" based on her MA project (supervised by Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska). A local secondary school in Opole invited her to present about the ways that social media thrive on the focus on celebrities and entrench the feelings of adolescents’ alienation and inadequacy. During a week-long event the school devoted to mental wellbeing and supports, Michalina conducted five workshops for 16/17-year olds (over 120 pupils) and engaged in Q&A.
Through this project, FORTHEM students – future teachers – can benefit from discussing a topic that is rarely addressed in pedagogy. About 30 students of MA in Secondary Education Teacher Training at UV were inspired by Dr. Juan Carlos Casañ-Núñez to approach body representations from the perspective of teaching innovation and educational research. The students were first trained to design scientific posters/infographics with CANVA software. Then, using a selection of reading materials and self-reflection, they were encouraged to think how to promote body neutrality and avoid body shaming in the classroom, and prepared awareness-raising body positivity posters that could help them do so. The posters will soon be available on display on campus in Valencia and Opole.
