ABSTRACT
Drawing from Giroux’s work, this chapter explores how sites of public pedagogies might create resistance to neoliberal, market-driven education and its production of the “neoliberal body” in Western society, staging ways of seeing the body from the perspectives of ethnic minoritized young people themselves. In this chapter, first, I suggest that to continue the struggle against the deleterious impacts of neoliberalism on young people’s lives, sites of public pedagogies—from art exhibitions to art-community centers to gallery exhibitions—enable ethnic minority young people to become critical agents for social justice and social change, maintaining a “public voice” against corporate power’s erosion of the public sphere, including the corporatization of globalized fitness and health. Second, I propose that public pedagogies work as pedagogies of resistance to the production of “neoliberal bodies,” reclaiming the public sphere as a space for ethnic minoritized young people to reconstruct and put on public display positive images of the “other” in fitness and health. Forms of critical public pedagogy, such as art exhibitions, open up different ways of seeing the body in society, voicing the “other” ‘s struggles, concerns, and experiences of the body, as well as creating a learning space for the viewer to encounter bodies with different backgrounds, experiences, knowledge, and expressions. In the last section, I contend that the public performance of “body encounters” embraces and legitimates the play of “difference,” reveals whiteness, and thus enriches the viewer’s understanding of the body, beyond the corporatization of globalized fitness and health, by putting on stage a complex, multicultural, and multi-layered construction of embodied identities.
