Bethan Evans

The Only Problem Is, Children Will Like Their Chips: Education and the Discursive Production of Ill-Health.

Abstract On 16 January 2002, the United Kingdom House of Commons Select Committee published a report entitled Tackling Obesity in England. Drawing on insights from the work of Bernstein, Bourdieu and Foucault, this article will suggest that the report provides an example par excellence of the way in which ‘the body’ (our bodies) are being constructed, defined, regulated and pathologised by contemporary health discourse. Furthermore, the article illustrates empirically how themes dominant in this report, grounded within wider regimes of health science ‘truth’, are reflected and reproduced in the curriculum and pedagogy of teachers (health experts), ironically in ways that potentially severely damage the health and identity of young people. To sharpen the focus of the analysis, the discussion centres attention on the relationships between formal education and eating disorders, specifically anorexia nervosa, in order to consider whether the ‘discourse of obesity’ potentially empowers or damages young peoples identity and health.

Moving beyond walkability: on the potential of health geography.

In the context of the substantial volume of research focused in recent years on the walkability of the built environment, this report presents some initial thoughts on what the sub-discipline of health geography might be able to contribute, beyond what it currently does, to existing debates. It is posited that at one level this contribution could be critical yet constructive, focussing on the limitations of current epistemological and methodological approaches but offering ideas on how they and others might be developed. At another level, given the limited scope of existing walkability research, a further contribution could be to pay attention to different forms of embodiment, movement activities, their relationships to health, and the places, experiences, agency and cultures involved.

Change4Life for Your Kids: Embodied Collectives and Public Health Pedagogy.

Recent work in human geography has begun to explore the fluidity of bodily boundaries and to foreground the connectedness of bodies to other bodies/objects/places. Across multiple subdisciplinary areas, including health, childrens and feminist geographies, geographers have begun to challenge the notion of a singular, bounded body by highlighting the importance of, for example, relations of care and intergenerationality to everyday embodied experiences; remembered past/anticipated future bodies to self-perception and body image; affect/emotion to the production of embodied collectives; and connections to distant and proximate others to understandings of embodied rights and responsibility. In this paper we will review these areas of work in order to explore the ways in which this geographical work on embodied connections might contribute to recent debates concerning public health pedagogy and the production of embodied and emotional collectives in education. This will involve an analysis of the recent anti-obesity Change4Life campaign in the UK; used in this context as a way to explore how the campaign attempts to produce healthy bodies through a form of pedagogy which is centred upon notions of embodied connectivities and collectives.

Making space for fat bodies? A critical account of ‘the obesogenic environment’

A key focus for geographical and policy work on obesity has involved interrogating the concept of an ‘obesogenic environment’ – an environment with particular physical, social and economic characteristics considered to contribute towards the propensity of bodies to be or to become obese/fat. Alongside this, Critical Geographies of Obesity/Fatness challenge the classification of fat bodies as diseased and in need of intervention by drawing attention to the politics surrounding the governance of fatness and the multiple experiences of body size. In this article, we place these strands of geographical work alongside each other in order to develop Critical Geographies of Obesogenic Environments. In so doing, we not only set out the main tenets of work in geography on obesity/fatness but also raise specific questions about how bodies, environments and body-environment interactions have been conceptualized and researched. We do so in order to develop and present three research trajectories for Critical Geographies of Obesogenic Environments which will allow geographical research to engage within obesity/fatness more carefully, reflexively and critically. Specifically, this involves: redefining obesogenic environments not as environments that make bodies fat, but as environments that make fat bodies problematic; engaging sensitively with the multiplicities of fat embodied experience; and considering alternative theoretical frameworks in order to avoid the pitfalls of environmental determinism.

Obesity discourse and fat politics: research, critique and interventions

Since the WHO (1998) lamented the so-called ‘obesity epidemic’ over a decade ago, there has been much rhetoric and concern about fatness/weight/obesity across an increasing range of national contexts. Alarmist claims about an ‘obesity time-bomb’ are continually recycled in policy reports, reviews and white papers, each of which begin with the assumption that fatness is fundamentally unhealthy and damaging to national economies (UK examples include: AMRC 2013; Foresight 2007; HOC 2004). This rhetoric and the associated moral panic have been amplified by a dramatising mass media (Boero 2012; also, see Boero in this issue) and have in no way dissipated even though certain ‘sceptics’ maintain the ‘crisis’ is coming to an end (Gard 2011; for a critique, see Lupton 2013). Recent examples of what Saguy and Almeling (2005) call ‘fat panic’ are not difficult to find. In February 2013, shortly before we finalised this special issue, the AMRC (2013, 7) released a well-publicised report, Measuring Up, which reiterated the dominant view: fatness is ‘a problem of epidemic proportions’ that ‘must now be tackled urgently’. Similar to earlier manifestations of fat panic (see McPhail 2009, for example), these public health concerns intersect with broader political economic anxieties about poor national fitness, with the UK labelled as ‘the “fat man” (sic) of Europe’ (AMRC 2013, 3). This document, like others before it, legitimises calls for various interventions to tackle the ‘problem of obesity’ (e.g. intensified surveillance inside and outside of the clinic, including injunctions that healthcare professionals must attend to their own weight); interventions which aim to literally reduce the number of bodies of ‘size’ and the size of individuals’ bodies (Evans and Colls 2009). This dominant ‘obesity epidemic’ narrative and rhetoric – what John Evans et al. (2008) term ‘fat fabrications’ – not only emerges in policy reports but also in academic literature, including papers written by respected contributors to this journal. For example, Bagwell (2013) and De Vogli et al. (2013) are concerned respectively with public health efforts to ‘tackle’ and ‘control’ the ‘obesity epidemic’. Such studies, similar to sociological publications on obesity rates (Crossley 2004) and geographical work on so-called ‘obesogenic environments’ (Smith and Cummins 2008; for critiques see Colls and Evans forthcoming; Evans, Crookes and Coaffee 2012; Guthman 2011; Kirkland 2011), are useful insofar as they draw attention to the ways in which social, political and economic factors shape and constrain people’s life chances and consumptive practices. However, we disagree with the common research and policy emphasis on body size/weight/fatness as a proxy for health as well as the assumption that diet and/or physical activity unequivocally explain trends in obesity regardless of other possible contributors (e.g. endocrine disruptors, sleep debt, smoking cessation and side effects from medicines) (see Keith et al. 2006). Specifically, we question the assertion of a Critical Public Health, 2013 Vol. 23, No. 3, 249–262, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2013.814312

More than Just Worksheets?: A Study of the Confidence of Newly Qualified Teachers of English in Teaching Personal, Social and Health Education in Secondary Schools

Abstract This paper addresses concerns regarding the preparedness of newly qualified teachers to deliver Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE) in the United Kingdom in relation to the training received during Initial Teacher Education and through early Continuing Professional Development. The paper is situated not only within a context where OfSTED has questioned the adequacy of some non-specialist PSHE teachers but also one where, due to a range of social and health concerns centred on young people, schools and teachers are being expected to play an increasingly important role in the social and health education of their pupils. As such, PSHE is increasingly seen as important across all curriculum areas. This paper relates specifically to the confidence of trainee and newly qualified teachers of English in teaching PSHE in secondary schools in the United Kingdom. Drawing on questionnaire data collected from recent Professional Graduate Certificate in Education graduates, the paper suggests that trainee and newly qualified teachers have the skills and knowledge drawn from their main subject (English) to deliver PSHE; however, many lack confidence and awareness to acknowledge these skills. The paper suggests that this situation may be addressed through increased opportunity to deliver and receive feedback on PSHE teaching during initial teacher training.

Doing More Good than Harm? The Absent Presence of Children’s Bodies in (Anti-)Obesity Policy

The current moral panic about fatness in the United Kingdom (as in many other countries) has resulted in the ongoing development of numerous initiatives implemented in an attempt to defuse the so-called ‘obesity time bomb’. As the quote above illustrates, concern about the potential future implications of existing bodyweight/mass is heightened in UK policy discourse when it is focused on children and young people and resultant policy initiatives have in the main aimed to control and regulate children’s (potentially) obese bodies over and above adults’ (see also HOC, 2004; DH, 2008). Building on the critique of the so-called ‘obesity epidemic’ developed in earlier chapters, here we question both the justifications for and the implications of the focus on children in UK anti-obesity policy.1 We do so with reference to recent work across the social sciences, which has questioned how socially constructed ideas about childhood mean that children are increasingly central to political attempts to predict and govern the future in ways which may have unintended consequences for children’s well-being in the here-and-now. We do so with reference to recent work across the social sciences, which has questioned how socially constructed ideas about childhood mean that children are increasingly central to political attempts to predict and govern the future in ways which may have unintended consequences for children’s well-being in the here-and-now. In particular, we draw on work which interrogates the anticipatory logics underpinning both dominant constructions of childhood within policy action which attempts to ameliorate future problems (Ruddick, 2006) and the political economies through which childhood is constructed as a period of investment for the future (Katz, 2008).

Curiosity, place and wellbeing: encouraging place-specific curiosity as a "way to wellbeing'

This paper advances understandings of relationships between wellbeing and place by exploring one mechanism by which place is mobilised in the pursuit of wellbeing: the cultivation and practice of curiosity. It does so through discussion of projects funded through the Decade of Health and Wellbeing in Liverpool, England. This scheme advances ‘five ways to wellbeing,’ one of which – ‘take notice’ – encourages curiosity in and about places. Three projects – memory boxes for people living with dementia; a community garden in an area experiencing socio-economic deprivation; and an urban photography project involving veterans – form the case studies on which this paper is based. We focus on two related sets of practices and approaches to curiosity: (1) learning to see places differently; (2) focussing on the micro-geographies of place – literally, curiosities – such as found objects. These practices suggest ways in which ordinary places may be a catalyst for curiosity in ways that may benefit both individual and collective forms of wellbeing. This allows us to see and understand place and wellbeing in relational terms. In so doing, this paper contributes to conceptual debates about wellbeing, place and curiosity, and the relationships between these.

‘Must I seize every opportunity?’ Complicity, confrontation and the problem of researching (anti-) fatness

This paper draws on the experiences of two researchers working to develop critical accounts of fatness with very different research participants – town planners and English Channel swimmers. Drawing across our encounters with these different participants, we explore the ‘doing’ of critical research through attending to the embodied encounters which take place in the ‘field’. In so doing, we reflect on moments where we have both, as part of the research encounter, not only found ourselves simply in fat-phobic contexts, but also effectively complicit in those contexts in our roles as interlocutors. In this paper, we explore the tensions inherent in those encounters for us (in all our multiple social, professional and embodied subjectivities), and ask what attending to these embodied confrontations (or the avoidance of confrontation) might mean for the critical research process – both in terms of the impact on practice and outputs of research for individual researchers and the participants with whom they are working. In doing so, we focus on what attention to the research encounter adds to debates about ‘impact’ in social science, about the doing of scholar-activism and about the role of the researcher’s body in the research encounter.

Friendship, curiosity and the city: Dementia friends and memory walks in Liverpool

The city is not just a context for friendships or a problem to be solved through them; it can be a catalyst for these relationships, sparking and strengthening connections between individuals and groups. Shared experiences of and curiosity in cities – expressed through practices that include revisiting familiar places and exploring others for the first time – can draw people together in beneficial ways. These principles underpin a health and wellbeing agenda, pioneered in Liverpool, which encourages people to ‘take notice’ and ‘connect’ – two of five ‘ways to wellbeing’ promoted through the Liverpool Decade of Health and Wellbeing. This paper focusses upon one particular set of schemes and relationships which brings all this into focus: befriending schemes designed to support people with dementia, which engage with objects and places as catalysts for connection. These observations shed a broader light upon the meanings and uses of friendship, with particular reference to cities.