This paper draws on data collected from young white middle class women experiencing eating disorders to highlight what we refer to as the paradox of performativity in schools. In interviews with these young women on their schooling experiences, their narratives convey both a critique of the social conditions of their schooling and their subjugated…

Schools within a "knowledge economy" nurture and endorse particular "corporeal orientations", that is to say, ascribe value, meaning and potential to "the body" (particular bodies) in time, place and space. Such processes reflect wider (national and global) socio-economic trends. In contemporary culture, these processes increasingly celebrate…

This paper focuses upon relationships barely explored in the sociology of education either in the UK or elsewhere that lie between the practices and processes of formal education and the aetiology (the 'causations') and development of eating disorders, specifically, anorexia nervosa (AN) in young women and girls. In so doing, it also touches on…

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…

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…

Over the last two decades we have witnessed an emerging set of conditions in schools which render them contexts replete with social messages about the body, health, and self. Research has suggested that both the formal and informal contexts of education are heavily imbued with a "culture of healthism" which places moral obligation and…