What do different theories do in research health-related public pedagogies on digital technologies?

Digital technologies function as pervasive public pedagogies through which young people learn about health and bodies. In this chapter, we highlight some ongoing conversations within public pedagogy research, exploring how social media operates pedagogically in its intersection with formal pedagogical spaces and learning practices. We analyze how to facilitate the enactment of public pedagogies to bring about positive change, as well as examining the expansion of sites and processes that have pedagogical potential. We develop these conversations by exploring how different social theories ‘do’ different things for us as researchers and in terms of what we claim about social media and how we enact public pedagogies. We firstly review literature on social media health-related learning that adopts different theoretical lenses from those focusing on discourse and language to more-than-human approaches. Then, we provide examples of how we have collaboratively researched young women's engagements with health-related social media to demonstrate why and how we applied the works of Foucault, Bourdieu and feminist new materialism. This research journey shows our evolving understandings of learning, pedagogy and the ‘public’, which materialised in a subsequent project with Physical Education (PE) teachers. We conclude by discussing the implications of this work and by mapping areas for future research and practice.