The healthy child citizen: biopedagogies and web-based health promotion

Abstract

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.

Young people’s uses of wearable healthy lifestyle technologies; surveillance, self-surveillance and resistance

“…We know from earlier discussions that young people require support to address health equalling to numbers like BMI, steps or results on fitness tests (e.g. Petherick, 2015;Wright & Halse, 2014).…”

“…One reading of this could be to disregard healthy lifestyle technologies from education contexts. On the other hand, the pervasiveness of healthy lifestyle technologies in society, their growing use by young people (Depper & Howe, 2017;Wartella et al, 2016), and the role of body pedagogies outside of school influencing health-related behaviours (Powell & Fitzpatrick, 2015;Wright & Halse, 2014) encourages further thought and consideration about the role of technology in schools and in physical education.…”

“…Drawing on Wright and Halse (2014), the biopedagogical practices of the Fitbit thus worked to instruct, regulate, normalise, and construct an idea of a healthy young person as being active, fit and motivated to do 10,000 steps per day. Similar to cautions raised by Gard (2014), Powell and Fitzpatrick's (2015) and Depper and Howe (2017), daily step targets reproduced an idea that health was achieved through 10,000 steps, positioning the young people as being active or inactive, fit or fat, healthy or unhealthy, good or bad, or those who cared or didn't care about their health.…”

Are we fit yet? English adolescent girls’ experiences of health and fitness apps

“…Although the girls critiqued the lack of "normal" bodies and preoccupation with the "perfect body" on apps, they reinforced restrictive health discourses inherent in the gradual progression towards an 'ideal'. This highlights the pedagogical nature of individuals' engagement with digital technologies; through which adolescents can learn how to transform one's body to achieve the 'appropriate' body and become healthy bio-citizens (Wright & Halse, 2014). It is again important to emphasise that the girls were not entirely self-reflexive and often reflected upon the responses of other individuals, whom they thought lacked the motivation to engage in health and sporting pursuits.…”

Governing food choices: a critical analysis of school food pedagogies and young people’s responses in contemporary times

“…The term biopedagogies, according to Wright and Halse (2013), describes the values and practices that are disseminated through both formal and informal educational sites to instruct, regulate and construct understandings of citizens and their bodies. Effectively biopedagogies operate as what Miller and Rose (1990) refer to as technologies of governmentality.…”