Leisure activities claiming to promote health and fitness have been an increasing feature of contemporary society. The impact of such activities on social inequality is an important area of study for both theoretical and policy reasons. This paper adopts an embodied approach to explore the development of long-distance running and the gendered, aged and classed nature of it. It is based upon part of a study which involved analysing a running magazine which was first entitled Jogging Magazine, quickly became Running and is now known as Runner's World, and ten interviews with runners. The paper illustrates connections between the knowledges, practices, organization and values promoted through running (from 1979-1998) and the growing popularity of a particular bodily type and style. The popularity of the slender muscular body has developed with the growth of leisure-sports like running. It has become the ideal for men and women of all ages, but has been particularly related to the middle-classes. Participation is thought to bring both health and aesthetic benefits for individuals. From the realist perspective adopted, the necessary mechanisms of running culture and the forms of embodiment promoted can be viewed as important in constituting class, gender and age processes. I suggest that viewing the emergent powers of sports like running utilising embodied approaches is important because they raise issues around the promotion of leisure activities that are viewed as unproblematically 'healthy'. In the case of running it is found that it promotes an embodiment of middle-classness that naturalizes gender and age inequalities whilst also individualising responsibility for them

A note on versions:The version presented here may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the repository url above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription. AbstractIn this article we examine how students' accounts of the discipline of sociology change over the course of their undergraduate degrees. Based on a phenomenographic analysis of 86 interviews with 32 sociology and criminology students over the course of their undergraduate degrees, we constituted five different ways of accounting for sociology.These ranged from describing sociology as a form of personal development focused on developing the students' opinion to describing sociology as a partial way of studying the relations between people and society. The majority of students expressed more inclusive accounts of sociology over the course of their degrees. However, some students' accounts suggested they had become disengaged with sociology. We argue that the differences in the ways that students were disengaged were not captured by our phenomenographic categories. In conclusion, we argue that our analysis illustrates the crucial role that students' relations to knowledge play in understanding the transformative nature of higher education.

Existing ways of understanding the transformative potential of students' undergraduate experiences either focus solely on the formal educational elements of these experiences or present an overly static picture of students' intentions in engaging in higher education. In this article we argue that the notion of 'personal project' offers a more flexible way of understanding what students are trying to gain from being at university. Based on a phenomenographic analysis of interviews with 31 students over the three years of their degrees, we examine how sociology students' accounts of their personal projects develop over the three years of their degree programmes and how these relate to their accounts of their integration into their institutions and the development of their intellectual engagement with their discipline. We argue that students' accounts of their personal projects are relatively stable over the course of their degrees but do not appear to shape the development of their intellectual engagement with their degree programme. What appears to be more significant is whether or not students understand their time at university as an educational experience. Based on this, we argue that the transformative elements of an undergraduate education lie in students developing their personal projects and intellectual engagement through the educational context that is offered at university.

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This paper illustrates how critical use of Basil Bernstein’s theory illuminates the mechanisms by which university knowledge, curriculum and pedagogy both reproduce and interrupt social inequalities. To this end, empirical examples are selected from the findings of the ESRC-funded project ‘Pedagogic Quality and Inequality in University First Degrees’ (RES-062-23-1438, November 2008–January 2012). The project investigated sociology-related social science degrees in four social science departments in universities in different positions in influential UK higher education league tables. A Bernsteinian lens throws fresh light on how university education might contribute to a more egalitarian society