Digital Sociology Podcast

For this final episode in the series I spoke to Aristea Fotopolou about her work on gender, data and self-tracking. She told me about her work on fertility and pregnancy apps and how they construct and embody discourses of gender, capitalism and neoliberalism. We question the extent to which we are encouraged to be "good citizens". In my view Aristea has some very interesting and useful ways of conceptualising the ways in which we engage with health and exercise tracking such as "biopedagogy" and focusing on the "micropractices" of using technology. Aristea tells me about her experience of conducting an autoethnography of her use of self-tracking and how her identity as a researcher and a research participant blurred. In the discussion Aristea connects the discussion of self-tracking to her other work on feminist activism and digital networks through suggesting that tracking is a form of gendered labour.