Self-Tracking Entanglements and Critical Practices: A New Materialist Approach to Digital Health Technologies

Informed by the conceptual streams of new materialism(s) and situated within the field of Critical Digital Health Studies, I look at intersecting themes of embodiment, human-technology-data intra-actions, health, and performativity by mobilising sophisticated theoretical resources and rich qualitative methodologies.
My project is structured around two pairs of questions:
1)How do particular configurations of self-tracking (S-T) apparatuses emerge? How.do they influence the cultivation and embodied performance of health-orientated subjectivities?
2)How is the body rendered through entangled performative enactments of S-T? How are these articulations of the body challenged, modified, or subverted through 'critical' practices of S-T?
Addressing a number of calls in the relevant literature, I apply and expand on complex sociomaterialist approaches to better understand the social and embodied implications arising from the development of S-T technologies in relation to the subversive techniques of S-T individuals that modify, challenge or resist dominant understandings of the body encouraged through conventional usage of these technologies.
Problematising the dominant understanding of these technologies and their usage, I suggest that S-T practices do not uncover qualities of a pre-existing body but rather are partially constitutive of the body and how the individual comes to understand themselves. The practical problem I wish to unpick is the nature of how S-T technologies are implicated in this nexus of pre-defined, neoliberal 'body projects' from a perspective that accounts for the relational, co-constitutive interactions between flesh, technology and wider semiotic-material forces. Ultimately, I seek to investigate individual instances of critical S-T practices that inform the production of alternative 'body projects' which contest dominant narratives of the fit, healthy body commonly promoted through consumer S-T technologies.
To understand the relationship between the technologies of S-T and the body as defined by my central research questions, a focus on the entangled development of such technologies, involving the agential intra-action of, among other elements, programmers, designers, marketers, medical professionals, algorithms, data protection laws, and app stores, is required. As such, the first core focus of my research will be to explore the processes through which tracked data is visualised and conceptualised into actionable knowledge. From this, how this produced knowledge is used to prescribe particular modes of behaviour and contribute to different understandings of the self and the body.
The relations between technology and the body are not coherent or linear, nor are the relational performances of S-T, but instead they emerge through a chaotic entanglement of factors that differ in each individual experience. Consequently, the second focus of my research centres around the tensions, negotiations, and subversions that are present in S-T practices between the body and technology. Through engaging with the dynamic array of bodies, technologies, and discourses to explore how they coalesce, stabilise and become realised through the iterative performances of S-T, I wish to articulate how the cultivation of a multiplicity of bodies is made possible through the critical, performative coupling of individuals and S-T technologies.
Methodologically, I am committed to a broader practice of analytical "reverse engineering" (Fox, 2015), I will use a multi-method methodology to split S-T entanglements to explore how bodies, technologies, and discourses materialise through relational, intra-active performances. This approach consists of three focused engagements-human bodies in performances of self-tracking; S-T software and hardware; and developers of S-T technologies-that seek to investigate the differing but relational practices that are mutually produced through the engagements of each co-constitutive component.