Gabrielle O'Flynn

The ‘good life’ and the ‘rich portfolio’: young women, schooling and neoliberal subjectification

This paper explores the ways two young women, living in Australia, make sense of themselves, their activities, and futures. The two young women come from two different schooling contexts—a prestigious private school and a government school. We analyse their self‐narratives in relation to neoliberal discourse, and consider how, and with what effects, their school contexts privilege and make available neoliberal discourses, and work to produce different subjectivities and notions of ‘worthwhile’ or ‘good’ lives. Conceptualising schools as sites of subjection, we analyse the discourses that their respective schools make available to the young women, and how they have appropriated them. We suggest that the different exposure and access to neoliberal discourses position the women very differently in terms of future possibilities and work‐life scenarios in the neoliberal economy. In that way, the article seeks to make a contribution towards understanding schools as implicated in social (re)production and in the (re)production of classed subjectivities.

A critical ‘critical inquiry’ proposition in Health and Physical Education

A critical inquiry approach is one of five key charateristics that have shaped the development of the new Australian Curriculum: Health and Physical Education (AC: HPE). However, what this means is open to interpretation. In the various documents leading to the consultation draft AC: HPE and in this document itself, critical inquiry is used in varying ways with differing intentions. In this paper, we examine the conditions of possibility for particular understandings of critical inquiry in the AC: HPE and the shifts in meaning over time in the AC: HPE documentation that has been publicly available for consultation. We examine the potential for particular versions of critical inquiry to be translated from curriculum documents to classroom teaching through an examination of how critical inquiry has been deployed by HPE preservice teachers in their teaching during their final professional experience.

Embodied subjectivities: Nine young women talking dance

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to examine nine Australian young womens embodied experiences of dance. The young women were all amateur dancers involved in weekly jazz, tap, and ballet dance classes at the same dance studio. In this paper, embodiment is defined as multidimensional (Burkitt 1999). The authors explore the ways the corporeal and the discursive converage to make possible particular experiences in dance and particular gendered selves. The analysis highlights the dominance of traditional notions of femininity and beauty in shaping the embodied experiences of these young women dancers. This paper discusses the need for conceptualizing the bodys role in the production of gendered selves. Teachers can encourage students to question and challenge the dominant gendered discourse, while also recognizing the importance of the bodily investments of individuals in particular gendered identities.

Beyond the academic precariat: a collective biography of poetic subjectivities in the neoliberal university

The ‘neoliberal turn’ in the higher education sector has received significant intellectual scrutiny in recent times. This scrutiny, led by many established academics working within the sector, has highlighted the negative repercussions for teaching and research staff, often referred to as the ‘academic precariat’ due to their tenuous employment prospects within an increasingly market-driven system. This critique of the modern university can also inadvertently position academics as either resisting or complying with neoliberal governance. This does not adequately account for the nuanced and poetic ways in which professional, personal and gendered subjectivities are formulated, intertwined and negotiated. In this paper we draw on the six overlapping yet distinct narratives of the six female authors, all early-career academics from Australia. We capture and analyse these narratives through collective biography, a qualitative methodology underpinned by the work of Davies and Gannon and others, that helps us to move beyond the ‘good vs. bad’, ‘resistance vs. compliance’ debates about academic life. We identify aspects of our lived subjectivities that offer rupture through poetic and hopeful ways of understanding how academics construct and negotiate their lives.

Runners, jumpers and throwers: embodied gender hierarchies in track and field

ABSTRACT There is currently considerable sociological research on women’s experiences in sport, the social construction of gender in women’s sport and inequalities between women and men. However, research is yet to examine how inequalities and gender construction occur in and through the hierarchies within women’s sports. Track and Field, with its differentiated events is a sport characterised by hierarchies, with Track events at the top and Field events at the bottom. Inherent in this differential valuing of the events is a hierarchy of bodily expressions of femininity. This article reports on a study which explored how fifteen elite female athletes in Track and Field negotiated the cultural and historical hierarchies between events, how these hierarchies shaped the women’s experiences and the ways they embodied gender. The study drew on Bourdieus notion of the cultural ‘field’, and his concept of ‘symbolic violence’ [Bourdieu, P. (1993). The field of cultural production: Essays on art and literature, edited and introduced by Randal Johnson. Cambridge: Polity Press] to explore how the women negotiated the hierarchical structuring between events. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the athletes across the disciplines of running, jumping and throwing. Results demonstrate how the hierarchies between women’s events were structurally maintained through practices such as the privileging of bodies conforming to traditional norms of femininity; and how the women themselves were implicated in maintaining these hierarchies through their language, practices and gendered embodiment. Hierarchies within women’s Track and Field are likely to impact aspiring athletes and shape their understandings of themselves as athletes and young women. Making visible such processes presents possibilities for discussions around gender and power in coaching and school contexts.

In search of the socially critical in health education: Exploring the views of health and physical education preservice teachers in Australia

Purpose Health education still tends to be dominated by an approach designed to achieve individual behaviour change through the provision of knowledge to avoid risk. In contrast, a critical inquiry approach educates children and young people to develop their capacity to engage critically with knowledge, through reasoning, problem solving and challenging taken for granted assumptions, including the socially critical approach which investigates the impact of social and economic inequalities on, for example, health status and cultural understandings. The purpose of this paper is to explore the conditions of possibility for a socially critical approach to health education in schools. It examines the ways in which preservice health and physical education (HPE) teachers talked about their experiences of health education during their school-based practicum. Design/methodology/approach In total, 13 preservice HPE teachers who were about to graduate with a Bachelor of Health and Physical Education from a university in New South Wales, Australia were interviewed for the study. Five group interviews and one individual interview were conducted. The interviews were coded for themes and interpreted drawing on a biopedagogical theoretical framework as a way of understanding the salience of particular forms of knowledge in health education, how these are promoted and with what effects for how living healthily is understood. Findings The HPETE students talked with some certainty about the purpose of health education as a means to improve the health of young people – a certainty afforded by a medico-scientific view of health imbued with individualised, risk discourses. This purpose was seen as being achieved through using pedagogies, particularly those involving technology, that produced learning activities that were “engaging” and “relevant” for young people. Largely absent from their talk was evidence that they valued or practiced a socially critical approach to health education. Practical implications This paper has practical implications for designing health education teacher programmes that are responsive to expectations that contemporary school health education curricula employ a critical inquiry approach. Originality/value This paper addresses an empirical gap in the literature on the conditions of possibility for a socially critical approach to health education. It is proposed that rather than challenging HPE preservice teachers’ desires to improve the lives of young people, teacher educators need to work more explicitly within an educative approach that considers social contexts, health inequalities and the limitations of a behaviour change model.