Ep 16 - Race, Social Media, and Yoga w/ Shanice Jones Cameron

Somatic Podcast

In this second part of our mini-series on the history and politics of yoga, we play our recent interview with Shanice Jones Cameron about her research on Black women and their engagement yoga through social media. Shanice is a PhD student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Department of Communication, and her research areas of interest include media studies, critical health communication, and Black feminism. As Shanice explains, today modern postural yoga remains "a form of exercise that remains exclusive to a privileged subset of the population." Meanwhile, the typical yoga practitioner, as it appears in advertisements and popular culture, tend to be White, female, and middle-class. This leads to important questions concerning the politics of representation in contemporary yoga culture. In this episode, Shanice discusses her research the intersections of race and representation in contemporary yoga culture, and explains the increasing importance of social media pages like the popular Instagram page Black Girl Yoga as digital spaces for building a yogini community for Black women and increasing the visibility of their engagement with yoga.