‘If You Really Knew Me’ … I am empowered through action

In this paper, we argue for the importance of creating a context that allows students to explore their sense of ‘self’ and their embodied identities, specifically within a physical education context. We specifically explore how students’ mediated and embodied identities are ‘translated’, particularly as they engaged in activist research by become co-meaning makers and co-interpreters throughout the research process. The purpose of this study was to engage high school girls in collaborative activist research to explore how they made meaning of their mediated identities, how they translated these identities to their embodied sense of self and how that influenced their schooling experiences. Participants were three ninth grade girls from a coeducational class in a suburban high school located in the Midwest region of the USA. During the first phase of the study, data were collected from focus group interviews, media consumption logs and descriptive field notes from observations. In the second phase, particip...