Emma Rich

Education, disordered eating and obesity discourse : fat fabrications

1. Introduction: The Rise and Rise of the Child Saving Movement 2. Body Pedagogies, Obesity Discourse and Disordered Eating 3. Sacred Knowledge, Science and Health Policy: Obesity as Instructional Discourse 4. Fat Ethics: Obesity as Regulative Discourse 5. Popular Pedagogies, Popular Culture and Media Lifestyle Advertising 6. Solving the Obesity Crisis?: Health P/policy in Totally Pedagogised Schools 7. Class, Control and Embodiment. What Schools do to Middle Class Girls? 8. Affective Pedagogies: Emotion and Desire in Learning to Become Ill 9. Alternative Pedagogies: Rethinking Health 10. Health Education, Weight Management or Social Control?

The Medicalization of Cyberspace

The entire infrastructure and culture of medicine is being transformed by digital technology, the Internet and mobile devices. Cyberspace is now regularly used to provide medical advice and medication, with great numbers of sufferers immersing themselves within virtual communities. What are the implications of this medicalization of cyberspace for how people make sense of health and identity? The Medicalization of Cyberspace is the first book to explore the relationship between digital culture and medical sociology. It examines how technology is redefining expectations of and relationships with medical culture, addressing the following questions: How will the rise of digital communities affect traditional notions of medical expertise? What will the medicalization of cyberspace mean in a new era of posthuman enhancements? How should we regard hype and exaggeration about science in the media and how can this encourage public engagement with bioethics? This book looks at the complex interactions between health, medicalization, cyberculture, the body and identity. It addresses topical issues, such as medical governance, reproductive rights, eating disorders, Web 2.0, and perspectives on posthumanism. It is essential reading for healthcare professionals and social, philosophical and cultural theorists of health.

Obesity assemblages and surveillance in schools

In this paper, I draw on the growing body of work in surveillance studies, to examine the increasing propensity in recent years towards the monitoring and collection of information about children’s weight and health within school contexts. Applying Haggerty and Ericson’s concept of the surveillant assemblage within school contexts, the paper examines how surveillant practices in schools are part of an assemblage constituted by a range of agencies, institutions and bodies, and socio‐technological developments constituted through a complex series of rhizomatic flows.

Public health pedagogy, border crossings and physical activity at every size

This paper examines the current weight-centric approach to the promotion and practice of physical activity for health. We argue that examining the assumptions and belief systems that drive physical activity promotion may provide a foundation for considering and pursuing appropriate forms of social change in the policy, prescription and practice fields. Counter perspectives and critical voices offering alternative health paradigms are systematically marginalised or silenced in this discourse. We outline the significance of a public pedagogy approach in developing alternative ways of promoting, representing and experiencing physical activity beyond weight focused perspectives. We advocate that physical activity policy makers and practitioners, including those promoting a non weight-centric approach to health need to undertake ‘border crossing’ and work across ‘artificial’ institutional barriers. The paper discusses the principles of a non-weight based, cross-disciplinary Health at Every Size (HAES) approach. It presents a critical examination of the potentials of harnessing a HAES paradigm as an alternative to a weight-loss focused physical activity intervention. At the same time, it argues that even this approach needs to better address the complexities of weight rather than search for singular, universal responses to the problems of healthism.

Mobile, wearable and ingestible health technologies: towards a critical research agenda

ABSTRACT In this article, we review critical research on mobile and wearable health technologies focused on the promotion of ‘healthy lifestyles’. We begin by discussing key governmental and policy interests which indicate a shift towards greater digital integration in health care. Subsequently, we review relevant research literature, which highlights concerns about inclusion, social justice, and ownership of mobile health data, which we argue, provoke a series of key sociological questions that are in need of additional investigation. We examine the expansion of what counts as health data, as a basis for advocating the need for greater research into this area. Finally, we consider how digital devices raise questions about the reconfiguration of relationships, behaviours, and concepts of individuality.

Health imperatives in primary schools across three countries: intersections of class, culture and subjectivity

In this article, we want to focus on the impact of the new health imperatives on young children attending primary schools because the evidence from both our own and others work suggests that younger and younger children are talking in very negative and disturbing ways about themselves and their bodies. We see this in a context where in the name of getting in early, governments and authorities are targeting primary schools and primary school parents and children for messages about health and weight. Just as ‘obesity’ has become a global concern, we argue that globalisation of risk discourses and the individualisation of risk, the league table on which country is becoming the fattest have impacted on government policies, interventions, schools and children in ways which have much in common. In this article, then we argue first, that there is a problem (it is not one of children becoming fatter, but rather the way in which the ideas associated with the obesity crisis are being taken up by many children), and second, that the ways in which these ideas are taken up are not uniform across or within countries but depend on contexts: national contexts including, but not only, government policies and campaigns; and contexts within countries which vary with the social and cultural demographics of schools, in ways that are similar across countries.

Beyond School Boundaries: New Health Imperatives, Families and Schools.

This article draws upon research examining the impact of new health imperatives on schools in the United Kingdom. Specifically, it examines features of emerging surveillant relations, which not only speak to the changing nature of health-related practices in schools but have particular currency for broader understandings of theorisations of surveillance, and which complicate the view that schools are bounded or territorialised in enacting forms of governance. The article explores how the assemblages through which these biopedagogies are formed constitute emerging interdependent relations between schools and families. The article recognises the presence of amalgamated and extended pedagogies in schools; approaches within which deliberate attempts were made to ensure whether what students learn in schools was continued beyond the formal school contexts. Among the schools that took part in the research reported in this article, many of them recognised that families constituted a site of learning about health. To this end, there were deliberate attempts to inculcate particular health values and meanings within school and to extend these across other sites of learning such as within the family. The use of surveillant practices utilised to achieve this end is a specific focus of this article and speaks to the broader aspects of what Giroux and others have referred to as ‘public pedagogy’ which recognise public, popular and cultural spaces as pedagogical sites. The article concludes by suggesting that studies in biopedagogy would benefit not only from a more nuanced understanding of the surveillant forces of pedagogy, but also of the pedagogical flows and forces of what are seen as forms of surveillance.

I move like you... But different:Biopolitics and embodied methodologies

Our aim in this article is to throw light on the complexity of the presence of the researcher’s body in the context of conducting research on and within biopolitical governance. To do so, we present author body-narratives derived from two separatestudies, both of which explore biopolitics and draw on an embodied methodology. These narratives point toward the corporeal contradictions of being located within a culture of reading and critiquing bodies while realizing the presence of our own physicality. We argue that methodological reflection on the connections between bodies within the research field ought to rest high among the list of things shaping the future of work related to biopolitics or we risk the effacement of the body. We articulate this in two key ways. First, we examine the emplacement of the fleshy bodies of researchers and the individuals we encounter. We offer reflections on the complexities of the emplacement of our researcher bodies in time, space, and place, and advance a politics of reflexivity that sheds light on how we experience, make claims, and speak about embodiment and physical culture. Second, as scholars who seek to disrupt biopolitical forces and attempt to transcend political and disciplinary boundaries, we consider the presence of the body in a process of border crossing. Rather than simply considering border crossing as an exchange of ideas, knowledge, and practices; we explore the ways in which the presence of our sometimes “normative” bodies can seemingly complicate and contradict our political agenda.

Introduction: Contesting Obesity Discourse and Presenting an Alternative

Formidable authorities continue to issue warnings about a global ‘obesity crisis’ (UK Parliament, 2004; WHO, 1998), ultimately the result of inactive lifestyles and poor diets. What medicine calls ‘obesity’, and its precursor ‘overweight’, must be fought, we are told, because they lead to escalating morbidity and mortality from, among other conditions, hypertension, diabetes, stroke, heart disease and cancers. These twin ideas of runaway population weight gain and ‘excess’ bodyweight being intrinsically associated with poor health have achieved such momentum in developed nations that it is difficult in the contemporary discursive terrain to imagine fatness as anything other than obesity: unhealthy, morally defunct and something to be corrected. As such, obesity is an issue that routinely pervades all corners of our late modern cultural landscape,1 albeit through a limited and often reductive way of thinking which not only restricts how we come to understand it, but which can explode into knee-jerk reactionary panics. Presenting an alternative perspective is the obesity challenge we tackle throughout this book.

(Re-)thinking digital leisure

4D ibabyscans, wearable baby gro’s/monitors incorporating movement-based technologies and provide real-time video on your iPhone while your baby sleeps, speak to a dazzling assemblage of digital technologies, products, commodities, platforms, materialities and virtualities that enculturate, envelop and are embodied on/in the contemporary corporeality of young people, almost from conception. Play – commodified in the form of soccertots, rugbytots, waterbabies, turtletots, tumbletots, bunnies (gymnastics), musicbugs, and now digitised and quantified (real time ipad feedback during toddler swimming lessons) – is, we are told due to concerns over safety, the loss/privatisation of open space in our communities and multiple other ‘risks’, not something that can or should be done outside or alone. Tablets, phones, computers, consoles and touch screens in reception classes have become the new techno-pedagogic (Rich & Miah, 2014) devices through which the educative, leisured, consumptive and play elements of the everyday are filtered and organised. The capacity for mobile connectivity has blurred the boundaries between public/private/digitised leisure spaces. Our every step surveilled, logged, recorded and stored, as we engage in our neoliberal consumptive practices. Going to the cinema, eating out at a restaurant, taking a trip, shopping in themed malls part of a ‘surveillant assemblage’ (Haggerty & Ericson, 2000) predicated on an aegis of suspicion and a global climate of fear (see Bigo, 2011). Even Christmas is militarised and bought to us by NORAD. (Awkward) physical teenage relationships re-defined by shifting expectations brought about by the ubiquity of online pornography; bedrooms redefined as sexting production studios or as amateur porn streaming showrooms. Fitbit, Jawbone, Garmin, Microsoft Band, MiCoach, Strava, MapmyRun, RunKeeper, Runtastic, Nike+ FuelBand, Endomondo, Lose It!, Pokemon Go quantifying, shaping, sharing and augmenting our physical exertions, instructing us as we glide, plod, pedal, trot and chase. We are living in a digital culture in which personalised data are amassed in great volume and variety and are exchanged with great velocity. Selfies, belfies (bottom or belly selfies), shelfies (of one’s bookshelf), lelfies (legs) and even pelfies (female genitalia, with the dic-pic the male equivalent) overdetermine (to differing intensities) a digitised and exacerbated visual youth leisure culture on a variety of social media platforms (from Facebook to Snapchat to Twitter to Instagram and everything else in between), in which the body (shaped, sculpted, manicured and governed) is displayed (publically, and not just to [virtual] friends).The leisure practices, experiences, structures and forms of young people (their everyday lives) are digitised and datafied unlike anything we ever experienced. As Deborah Lupton points out in the foreword to this volume, lively devices generate lively data that have considerable implications in our understandings of a lively Leisure Studies. The papers in this special issue aim to contribute to such debates, offering nuanced understandings of how various instances, experiences, practices and structures of digital leisure are embedded in complex inter-connections with the economic and political trajectories of neoliberal consumer capitalism, surveillance and the unequal power relations extant in all leisure practices (Spracklen, 2015).