People

She is Senior Lecturer in Physical Education (PE) at the Faculty of Education of the University Complutense of Madrid (Spain). Her research mainly analyses sport and physical activity using a gender perspective both in young population and in teacher training. For example, she has studied gender differences in sport-related career choice paths of young people. Her recent research has addressed what and how young women learn about health, physical activity and bodies in social media and the tensions extant tensions between these informal learnings and the health-related learning spaces of Physical Education (PE). Currently, she is focused on the analysis of digital technologies for healthy lifestyles from a critical perspective with the aim to develop pedagogies for PE teachers.

Maria José has participated in numerous research projects. She is currently involved in the project ‘RESPECT-Young people’s produsage on social media: constructing sexual identities and managing gender inequalities’ funded by the Spanish Government. She has published broadly in each of these areas in peer-reviewed journals within the areas of gender, PE and education. She is member of the Institute of Feminist Research of the University Complutense of Madrid and has been Editor of its journal (Investigaciones Feministas) for the last five years.

Her research examines sport, physical activity and physical/health education from a critical/socio-cultural perspective. She has authored over 150 publications on topics including the social and cultural dimensions of: digital health technologies; obesity policy and politics; eating disorders and education; the body. Citations of her work currently total 2430 with an h-index of 27.

In broad terms, she research focuses on critical pedagogies of health and physical activity; advancing theoretical frameworks to understand how people learn about health and their bodies (pedagogical processes) and the impact this has on their identities, health practices, and physical activity. This work has contributed to the fields of sociology of health, critical weight studies, health studies, sociology of education and pedagogy. She is a named investigator on research projects which have received funding totalling over £1,225,310.

Recently, she has led an international research collaboration (funded by the Wellcome Trust) ‘The Digital Health Generation: The impact of ‘healthy lifestyle’ technologies on young people's learning, identities and health practices. The study has been the first to explore how young people engage with their health through new digital health technologies. Her major publications (books) are The Medicalization of Cyberspace (2008, Routledge, with Professor Andy Miah) Education, Disordered eating and Obesity Discourse: Fat Fabrications (2008, Routledege, with Professor John Evans) and Debating Obesity: Critical Perspectives (2011, Palgrave, with Monaghan and Aphramor).

Dr. Kristiina Kumpulainen is full Professor of Education, Faculty of Educational Sciences, UH. She is the founding member and Scientific Director of the Playful Learning Center and Co-Director of the Learning, Culture and Interventions (LECI) research community. In the year 2019, she was nominated to become a Fellow of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. She currently leads the Nordic Research Network on Digitalising Childhoods (DigiChild) funded by the Joint Committee for Nordic Research Councils in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NOS-HS). She is the co-editor of Elsevier’s journal Learning, Culture and Interaction. Her scholarship demonstrates a broad mastery of current and historical scholarship in research on children’s digital participation, literacies, learning and education. Many of her research projects have developed novel methodologies for analyzing social and multimodal interaction and literacy practices, and researching with children, increasing knowledge of collaborative research and democratic forms of inquiry.

She has a strong record of publications (Google Scholar h-index: 36) and externally funded research projects (over 6 milj. eur) from highly competitive and distinguished programs. She has led one the Finnish governments key projects on young children’s multiliteracies funded by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture (years 2016-2020). She currently leads an EU HORIZON 2020 research project “Widening and diversifying citizen engagement in science (ALLINTERACT) and a research project on “Children's ecological imagination and its pedagogical enhancement at the intersection of cultural stories and augmented reality technologies” funded by KONE foundation. Her recent books published by Routledge include Enhancing Digital Literacy and Creativity: Makerspaces in the Early Years (A. Blum-Ross, K., Kumpulainen, & J. Marsh, Eds.) and Multiliteracies and Early Years Innovation: Perspectives from Finland and beyond (K. Kumpulainen & J. Sefton-Green, Eds.). Her article “Teacher interventions in students’ collaborative work in a technology‐rich educational makerspace” (co-authored by Kajamaa, Kumpulainen and Olkinuora) published by the British Journal of Educational Technology in 2019 was selected as the winner of the BJET Editors’ Choice Award in the year 2021.

Before becoming a Senior Lecturer in Physical Education (PE) at Moray House School of Education and Sport, Shirley Gray was a secondary school PE teacher and then a Teaching Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Her previous research focused on the cognitive and affective aspects of teaching and learning in games, in particular she has researched the impact of games pedagogies on both the decision-making skills and motivation of primary and secondary school-aged children. She has also carried out research that has explored the construction of the Health and Wellbeing curriculum in Scotland, focusing on how the concept of health is articulated, interpreted and enacted in PE.

She is currently involved in several projects related to both curriculum and pedagogy, with an emphasis on health, gender, embodiment and digital technology. For example, she is working as part of a team of researchers from across the UK using a comparative approach to critically explore how PE is conceptualized, interpreted and enacted across Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England. She is also involved in a research project with colleagues from Australia to examine the concept of embodiment in PE – what this term means, how it is used, and how it might be better articulated to become a more useful and accessible term for PE teachers. She has published widely in each of these areas in several peer-reviewed journals within the fields of PE, education and curriculum.

He is the Coordinator of PhD Programme of Sociology and Social Research and has published extensively in the areas of digital health, illness and medicalization of life. His more relevant books are Digital Health and the Gamification of life. How Apps can Promote a Positive Medicalization (Emerald) and Good Pharma. The Public-Health Model of the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmachological Research(Palgrave Macmillan).

He has led several research projects and now is participating in the Horizon 2020 project called ONCORELIEF, A digital guardian angel enhancing cancer patient’s wellbeing and health status improvement following treatment.

He is the Editor-in-chief of the Italian journal “Salute e Società” (Health and Society). Moreover, he is the Scientific Director of the Center the Humanization of Health Care and Community Health (University of Bologna). As a member of the Executive Committee of the European Society for Health and Medical Sociology he is in charge of the organization of the ESHMS Biennal Conference, that will be held in Bologna-Forlì 2022.

Sarah’s research lies within the sociology of health, the body and physical education where she especially has experience of conducting ethnographic research to explore contemporary body-related culture amongst young people within school environments. She has examined how individuals engage with technology and social media to form perceptions of themselves and others, negotiate power relations and learn about health and the body.

She has also studied how discourses of the body influence young people’s experiences and learning within the physical education environment. Sarah designs and teaches on courses taking a sociocultural perspective on Physical Education to Initial Teacher Education students within Moray House School of Education and Sport. She has also published numerous papers in journals such as: Sport, Education and Society; the Journal of Youth Studies; and Curriculum Studies in Health and Education.