This article introduces some of the key concepts that we have used in our research to help illuminate the multiple and different ways in which apparently ubiquitous health policies relating to obesity, exercise, diet and health are mediated and shaped both globally and nationally, as well as within regional, school and other contexts. The analyses…

Drawing on research investigating the impact of health imperatives around obesity, diet and exercise on the actions of teachers and pupils in schools, this paper offers a reflexive account of the relationships between the "noise" of obesity discourse in the public domain, policies forged to tackle health issues and the realities of…

"Health" has become a major concern of policy makers internationally in recent years, especially where and when it is reduced to a measurable and, therefore, comparable commodity/"quality": weight and obesity levels. Schools in many countries have increasingly been charged with responsibility for safeguarding children's health,…

This paper examines the inexorable rise of "health" as regulative discourse, highlighting its class and cultural dimensions. With reference to the policy content of recent obesity reports, analysis suggests that contemporary concerns around obesity are but a modern variant of earlier eighteenth and nineteenth century child saving crusades whose…

Despite burgeoning interests in "the body" as a topic of sociological interest and analysis in recent decades, with few notable exceptions, the sociology of education has not taken as seriously as it might how "embodied subjectivities" both shape and are framed by contexts of teaching and learning. There are processes of formal…

This article discusses the social fabrication of risk and ill health in the United Kingdom and how it affect the physical education curriculum and physical education teachers. It is now well over 60 years since the publication in Britain of the Board of Education?s (1933) "Syllabus For Physical Training For Schools." It was a remarkable…