We drew on Foucault's notion of 'practices of the self' to examine how young people take up, negotiate, and resist the imperatives of a public health discourse concerned with the relationships between health, fitness, and the body. We did this through a discussion of the ways young women and men talk about their own and others' bodies, in the context of a number of in-depth interviews conducted for the Life Activity Project, a study of the place and meaning of physical activity in young people's lives, funded by an Australian Research Council Grant. We found that the young women and men in the study engaged the health/ fitness discourse very differently: for the young men, health conflated with fitness as an embodied capacity to do physical work; and for the young women, health was a much more difficult and complex project associated with managing and monitoring practices associated with eating and exercise to maintain an 'appropriate' body shape.

Objective To investigate New Zealand children’s understandings of ‘health’. Design Secondary analysis of student responses to a task called ‘Being Healthy’ in New Zealand’s National Education Monitoring Project. Setting Year 4 (8—9 year-old) and Year 8 (12—13 year-old) students who took part in New Zealand’s National Education Monitoring for Health and Physical Education in 2002. Method Coding of student responses using NVivo qualitative analysis package. Results Students reiterated messages widely promulgated in popular and professional mediums. Students predominantly conceived of health as a corporeal matter, citing eating, exercise and hygiene practices as the most important health promoting behaviours. Conclusion Students could usefully be encouraged to adopt socially critical understandings of what health might entail and broader, more holistic conceptualizations of health beyond matters of the ‘body’ alone.

Part of the Education Commons, and the Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Recommended Citation Wright, Jan and Halse, Christine, "The healthy child citizen: biopedagogies and web-based health promotion" (2014). Faculty of Social Sciences-Papers. 906.

Over the last decade intense concern has developed about what has been characterised as an obesity epidemic in the West. This concern has been accompanied by equally intense debates over the validity of this characterisation. Many critics see the epidemic designation as part of an intensifying 'moral panic' about fat in which emotions about fat shape the public and scientific debate. In this article we explore the critical literature on the obesity epidemic, noting the way in which it draws attention to the role of the emotions in discourse on the epidemic. We argue that the action of emotions in this context invites further theorisation, and that this theorisation needs to be undertaken via concepts that: (1) explicitly integrate the body and the emotions with the materialisation of political discourse, (2) avoid individualising and psychologising accounts of the emotions and (3) analyse the action of emotion in political debate without implying the need to eradicate emotion in generating more just and accurate perspectives. To this end, we turn to the work of Sara Ahmed, who has developed a sophisticated account of the role of the emotions in constructing social collectivities through their engagement with ideas of the body. We argue that this theory can be used to illuminate both the general relationship between public discourse and subjectivity, and the specific relationship between the self, the body and the oftentimes unmet imperative to slimness.

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