Health Matters
Picturing Students’ Ideals and Practices of Health in
Wellington Through A Photo Essay
Paola Tiné, Gabbie Drury, Beatrix
Sanders, Alexandra Lehmann, Ewan Lammie, Nathaniel Faull, Louis Hughes, Ella
Lamont, Claudia Kearns, Finn Iles, Toni Lane, Daisy Bell Thompson-Munn, Sophie
Lingham & Louisa Laing-Ots
Abstract
What are the pillars of your
personal ideals of health? How did they form, and what do they show about
yourself and your society? But more importantly, do your ideals match your
practices? A third-year cohort of students studying Medical Anthropology at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, New
Zealand, answered these questions in the form of a photo essay. Students found
this activity both discomforting and revelatory at the same time. They had to
go through a self-discovery journey where their approaches and ideas of health
were self-scrutinised. In the process, rebellion, anger, and dissatisfaction,
as well as feelings of defiance, self-improvement, self-care, and
self-reconstruction emerged. Stressing the notion of ‘self’, and the role of outside
agents, including substances, landscapes, and relationships with others in
their daily choices, these accounts reveal a difficult world that students have
to navigate each with their specific bodies and genetics, as they transition to
the next stages of adulthood. This work provides novel
insights into some problematic aspects of health experiences among university
students in Aotearoa New Zealand and their agentive responses. The paper concludes with a
reflection on the pedagogic and self-reflective processes initiated by this
assignment’s design, with instructions to the assignment provided as an
appendix.
Keywords health – adulthood – youth – visual methods – photo
essay
Introduction
What are the pillars of your
personal ideals of health? How did they form, and what do they show about
yourself and your society? But more importantly, do your ideals match your
practices? I (Paola Tiné), teacher of Medical
Anthropology at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University
of Wellington, New Zealand, asked my third-year cohort of students (some of
whom are the other authors in this paper) to answer these questions in the form
of a photo essay. The
aim of this assignment was to produce a photographic essay (5 images) and a
short accompanying essay that documents your approach to health. The
photographs had to convey some of the students’ daily practices and ideas of
healthy and/or unhealthy behaviour. They then needed to explain these
understandings and approaches in the written part of the assignment. They were
asked to choose a theme acting as a narrative thread, to keep the essay
focused, and to address 3 main prompts (self-ethnographic reflection, literature
engagement, and critique of the methods used) and engage with all the images.
The learning goal was to develop dialectical skills and critical thinking
abilities on the ethical and practical aspects of researching health-related
issues and to develop the ability to conduct autonomous data collection and
data analysis.
Students
found this activity discomforting and revelatory at the same time. They had to
go through a self-discovery journey where their approaches and ideas of health
were self-scrutinised. In the process, rebellion, anger, and dissatisfaction,
as well as feelings of defiance, self-improvement, self-care, and self-reconstruction
in a lived context characterised by contradictory messages and experiences
emerged. The main themes are discussed here under the macro-areas of ‘biopower
and docile bodies’, ‘matters of balance’, ‘chronic illnesses and medical
authorities’, and ‘situatedness of health’. The paper concludes with a
reflection on the pedagogic and self-reflective processes initiated by this
assignment design, with instructions to the assignment provided as an appendix.
Biopower and docile bodies
Alexandra
Lehmann discusses avoidant strategies, Gabbie Drury talks about daily rituals
of self-care against depression, and Ella Lamont reflects on the nexus between
health and social justice. These accounts engage with notions of biopower (as
developed by Michel Foucault) and ‘docile bodies’. Focusing
on problematic experiences with body image, Alexandra writes about the
experience of being without her parents and how she feels the need to establish
self-control around her eating practices. She writes:
My family always had a
complicated relationship with health and the body. My father’s fasting after
Christmas, my mother’s concern at her clothes size and my Jewish immigrant
grandparents feeding any guest to the point of bursting; how could I not have potentially
harmful preconceptions about what it means to be ‘healthy’. Additionally, I
have grown up in the technological age and particularly as a young woman
online, I am fed health inspirations constantly (Davies & Mann 2023, 416). Through being separated from
this environment (leaving home and deleting social media apps), I have begun to
undergo a restructuring of my own pillars of health.
Despite her family background and her situatedness as a young woman in a
society that dictates self-control around eating practices and modes of appearance, in moving to live alone as a student in a
different town, Alexandra has gradually created her own ethos around the ways
she approaches her physical health, her appearance, and her well-being. Through
a process of nurturing the body and avoiding certain practices that dictate how
she treats her body, Alexandra has found an avoidant strategy to reject biopower.
Foucault’s (1998 [1976]) theory of
biopower concerns itself with the power asserted through everyday
institutionalised activities and habits which subjugate the body, creating
‘docile bodies’ (Pylypa
1998: 21). Foucault's work is useful when considering how individuals are
complicit in performing their own oppression through self-surveillance and
self-disciplinary practices (Pylypa
1998: 22). Subjugation derives from forced control or through self-disciplinary
practices, which we each adopt, thereby subjugating ourselves. Others, such as Lock (1993: 141) have taken this
approach by Foucault in the opposite direction, centring the ways in which – because
of the centrality of the body in meaning-making, social control, power, and
moralities – we might be the owners who can nurture our bodies, rather than
‘self-discipline’ it. The first thing Alexandra does to achieve this is to
cross out the nutritional information of the food items in her cupboard (see
Image 1). Another way she achieves this is by hiding the mirror in her house:
A practice I used to partake and
which demonstrates biopower and self-surveillance, is when I used to stare
negatively at my body. My mirror hung on this wardrobe and I could critique
myself for hours. In sharing this with a friend, I became motivated to
remove/hide the mirrors I owned. The process of taking this photo was
uncomfortable. I felt embarrassed at the idea that something so normal to
someone, could trigger such unhealthy practices for me.
She also reflects on the sofa in her house as a place of intentional rest,
where she defies constraints of productivity:
Whilst health gurus on Instagram
may say a sedentary lifestyle is unhealthy, I choose to rest on this sofa to
keep myself active. The blanket knitted by my great-grandmother before she
passed away and the cushion crocheted by my friend as a present - this sofa
tells a story more than the idea that ‘sitting = lazy’. Through the act of
sitting on the sofa, I am rejecting notions that to be productive, I cannot
rest. This photo is an act of defiance.
Alexandra’s reflections continue as she considers the pervasiveness of
biopower. Foucault states that ‘where there is power there are always
resistances, for power inevitably creates and works through resistance’ (Lupton
1997, 200, in Suijker 2023, 546).
Fig. 1 “Food in the cupboard with
nutritional
information crossed out” © Alexandra Lehmann.
Similarly to Alexandra, Gabbie reflects on her daily
rituals of self-care against depression:
Doctors will not prescribe
65-75 houseplants for depression; they will often over-medicalise situations
and see the solution as physical treatments through prescription drugs. I
understand the need for medication, but for myself, I view a reliance on chemicals
that only best bring my mood to neutral as a long-term detriment to my health
when my daily rituals have, at worst, the same effect, and at best, a much
better one.
Taking salt for energy and
iron tablets for dizziness may not seem like they are important for my mental
health, but without them, I would lack the energy to water my plants, listen to
music and go outside. Everything I do is pre-emptive to protect myself in all
aspects of my health.
Social norms exercised under biopower show how we are subjugated to the
societal standards we experience, and, as Gabbie reflects, by choosing to
participate in her separate health journey, she has rejected the need to police
herself and instead allowed her to nurture herself. The images she has chosen
for her essay reflect this, as they are all focused on her own choices around
her own health that do not immediately reflect societally normative health
ideals (see for example, Image 2) And yet, for Gabbie, images escape what
health ‘looks like’, and they are rather a glimpse of what she does routinely,
where it is the routine that concretises her health. As she states: ‘I know
what my health looks like, and that cannot be expressed through photos, but
through the fact that I wake up every morning and do it all again.’
Fig. 2 ‘A selection of my many, many houseplants that
I use to boost my mood when at home’ © Gabbie Drury.
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