Publications

In this article, I examine the practice of outsourcing physical education (PE) lessons to external sports organisations. I draw from ethnographic research conducted with two primary schools in New Zealand to illuminate how outsourcing interconnects with the privatisation of education. Using Foucault's notion of government, I demonstrate how schools’ employment of four outside providers worked to govern teachers towards certain ends. In addition, I drew on the analytical framework of the assemblage to examine how the dual notions of the inexpert classroom teacher and the expert outside provider converged with the discourse of ‘PE as sport’, neoliberalism, Kiwisport, National Standards, professional development and multi-sector partnerships to form a privatisation assemblage. I argue that the privatisation assemblage worked to restrict and constrain teachers’ possible thoughts and actions, making teachers …

Concerns about a global childhood obesity crisis have led to a proliferation of primary school-based health education policies and practices. What is surprising, however, is the recent explosion of ‘obesity prevention’ programmes and resources that are devised, funded and implemented by multinational corporations and marketed to schools as ‘health education’. In this article, I draw on two corporate anti-obesity/health education programmes that are promoted to primary schools in the United Kingdom and Canada. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of governmentality, I examine how the ‘problem’ of childhood obesity has become an opportunity for corporations and other institutions to govern children. In particular, I interrogate how specific technologies of government – privatisation, corporate philanthropy and multi-sector partnerships – align with the neoliberal political rationality. I also argue that even though the …

In contemporary times, corporate philanthropy is positioned as an effective means to ‘solve’ a variety of social problems. Childhood obesity is one such ‘problem’ that has captured the interests of schools, corporations, industry groups and a number of ‘not-for-profit’ players. In this paper, I critically examine how the private sector uses the notion of philanthropy to shape school-based solutions to obesity and unhealthy lifestyles. By conducting a critical ethnography in two New Zealand primary schools and drawing on Foucauldian notions of government and ‘practices of assemblage’, I illuminate how a number of organisations officially planned to employ philanthropy as a means to govern others, as well as what actually happened when these plans met their intended targets: children, teachers and principals. Although corporations, charities and schools were assembled together through their combined ‘will to give …

In recent years, multinational food and drink corporations and their marketing practices have been blamed for the global childhood obesity ‘crisis’. Unsurprisingly, these corporations have been quick to refute these claims and now position themselves as ‘part of the solution’ to childhood obesity. In this paper, I examine how and why corporations fund, devise and/or implement ‘healthy lifestyles education’ programmes in schools. By using a critical ethnographic research approach alongside Foucault’s notion of governmentality, I interrogate what those with the ‘will to govern’ (such as corporations) wanted to happen (e.g. fight obesity, change marketing practices and increase consumption), but also what actually happened when these corporatised education programmes met their intended targets in three New Zealand primary schools. I critically examine these programmes by focusing on the ways in which three technologies of consumption – product placement, transforming children into marketers and sponsorship – attempt to govern children to be lifelong consumers of the corporate brand image and their allegedly ‘healthy’ corporate products. Although students were not necessarily naïve and easily coerced into becoming mindless consumers of corporate products, students and their teachers readily accepted that sponsorship, product placement and marketing in schools were normal, natural, necessary and mostly harmless. Healthy lifestyles education programmes represent a new ‘brand’ of health, health education and corporation. The child-citizen is governed to become the child-consumer. Corporations’ anxieties about being blamed for childhood obesity are fused with technologies of ‘healthy consumption’: the consumption of corporate products, corporate philanthropy, the corporate brand and corporate ‘education’.

Whilst globally there has been a great deal of discussion and rhetoric regarding the state of physical education at the primary level, there is a paucity of evidence regarding teachers’ perceptions of quality physical education in practice. Therefore, the purpose of this research was to explore and interpret primary school teachers’ perceptions of physical education in Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ) and identify the influence(s) of education, sport and health policies on these perceptions. This study utilized a mixed methods design, including a questionnaire of 487 classroom teachers from 133 different primary and intermediate schools in five regions (North Auckland, Auckland, Wellington, Canterbury and Southland) across NZ. The research team also interviewed 41 classroom teachers from across the five regions. Three themes were drawn from the teacher surveys and interviews: muddled thinking; teacher levels of …

In current times, the role of the private sector in devising, producing, and, of course, selling education services is becoming increasingly ubiquitous. As Ball (2012) points out, education is “big business”; a multi-billion dollar industry where “edu-businesses” profit from selling a range of professional development, leadership, consultancy, management, IT, and policy services. A number of these edu-businesses also devise and sell curricula (e.g., on-line resources, software, text-books, lesson plans), including health education curricula, to governments, universities, school districts, schools, and teachers across the globe.

This article sets out to demonstrate the considerable extent to which the New Zealand school system has become saturated by private interests, and to explain this development over time. It is the first such overview of the privatisation of schooling in the New Zealand context. The analysis illustrates that the rise of private actors has involved some long-term factors such as demographic and cultural features of New Zealand society as well as market and managerialist politics that have reduced state resources to schools and to the agencies that support them. More immediate enablers have been created by moments of crisis and the needs of particular policies. The article concludes by arguing that further attention needs to be paid to the complex histories of private sector involvement in education, especially when the conditions supporting private actors have often been piecemeal, uncertain, and serendipitous.

In this chapter we explore various school lunch policies and practices in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. We make the argument that contemporary lunchtime policies are guided by a desire to regulate and control consumption as well as to transmit particular ideological values around food and notions of what constitutes (un)healthy food choices. We consider the cultural, sociopolitical, and economic forces that render these surveillance and regulatory practices commonsensical. Our findings suggest that there are some common anxieties around consumption, health, and obesity that may be driving these kinds of transnational ‘lunching’ policies and pedagogies. While such campaigns, resources, and pedagogies are intended to be beneficial, they actually produce some troubling effects.

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Current concerns about an alleged childhood obesity crisis and children’s physical (in) activity levels have combined to justify fitness lessons as a physical education practice in New Zealand primary schools. Research concerning children’s understandings of fitness lessons, reveals that they construct fitness as primarily related to a quest for an ‘ideal’(skinny or muscular) body. The conflation of fitness with thinness, however, is complex and problematic.
In this research I used a visual methods approach to examine six primary school children’s responses from photo elicitation interviews. I drew on Foucault’s notion of discourse/power and his conceptualisation of governmentality to examine how six children experienced fitness lessons and constructed notions of fitness, health, self and the body. Results illustrated that the children made few links between fitness lessons and health or fitness lessons and learning. Their responses signified a constant tension between fitness lessons as fun and fitness lessons as overly repetitive and tiring. However, they drew on obesity discourses which link fitness lessons, as a means to lose fat and/or increase muscles. In accepting the obesity discourses as ‘true’, the children monitored, judged and moralised bodies and behaviours in dichotomous ways: fit or unfit, skinny or fat, active or lazy. They assumed that fitness lessons increased fitness, and that being fit ‘improved’their corporeal appearance. I coined the term COPE (Corporeal Orientated Physical Education) to highlight how such practices focus exclusively on the body at the expense of critical and holistic learning. I concluded that children’s subjectivities …

Teacher wellbeing is critical for effective implementation of positive education programs (Quinlan 2017; Slemp et al. 2017). Yet, few studies have explored teachers’ experiences of wellbeing, and how to enhance their wellbeing, beyond a focus on their individual practices. This case study examines teachers’ perceptions of leadership practices that influenced their wellbeing in an urban high-school in New Zealand. Purposive sampling was used to select three ‘high wellbeing’ and three ‘low wellbeing’ teachers, who then participated in semi-structured interviews and completed a wellbeing journal. This article focuses on the leadership actions that teachers identified as enhancing their well-being (feeling valued, meaningful professional development, agency in decision making) and the essential skills leaders demonstrated (relationship building, contextual competence, social and emotional competence …In this research I used a visual methods approach to examine six primary school children’s responses from photo elicitation interviews. I drew on Foucault’s notion of discourse/power and his conceptualisation of governmentality to examine how six children experienced fitness lessons and constructed notions of fitness, health, self and the body. Results illustrated that the children made few links between fitness lessons and health or fitness lessons and learning. Their responses signified a constant tension between fitness lessons as fun and fitness lessons as overly repetitive and tiring. However, they drew on obesity discourses which link fitness lessons, as a means to lose fat and/or increase muscles. In accepting the obesity discourses as ‘true’, the children monitored, judged and moralised bodies and behaviours in dichotomous ways: fit or unfit, skinny or fat, active or lazy. They assumed that fitness lessons increased fitness, and that being fit ‘improved’their corporeal appearance. I coined the term COPE (Corporeal Orientated Physical Education) to highlight how such practices focus exclusively on the body at the expense of critical and holistic learning. I concluded that children’s subjectivities …

This chapter provides a critical examination of some of the key tensions, arguments and problems that arise when primary Physical Education (PE) and contemporary notions of health become bedfellows. It outlines the crucial ideologies and discourses of health that frame primary PE, with a particular focus on the role of 'new public health', 'healthism', and the attempt to make individuals responsible for their own health. The chapter also provides that a closer interrogation of the childhood obesity 'crisis' and the ways in which PE is positioned as both a cause of and solution to obesity. Lisette Burrows and Jan Wright express concern "that the identities constructed for children within contemporary panics around childhood obesity especially, are 'dangerous' ones". The chapter highlights the ways in which the relationship between primary PE and health may actually, albeit unintentionally, be 'unhealthy' for some …

The scientific knowledge about diet, fatness, and health is constantly changing and being challenged (Gard & Wright, 2005; Kirk, 2006). The validity of the Body Mass Index (BMI), for example, has fallen into disrepute (Ross, 2005), the food pyramid has had several rearrangements (Kinney, 2005), the alleged health benefits of a high carbohydrate/low fat diet are being challenged (Paoli, Rubini, Volek, & Grimaldi, 2013), and ideas about being" overweight" or" underweight" and their relationship to poor health have been turned on their head (Gard & Wright, 2005). Despite the scientific uncertainties concerning diet, body composition, and health, many teachers-particularly physical education teachers (eg, Trost, 2006)-continue to believe that the world is in the grips of an" obesity epidemic" and it is their duty to promote the virtues of physical activity and the problems of fat. Although many of these teachers are well …

This article seeks to describe a range of enablers of, and constraints on, private actors in New Zealand schooling, using scholarly, polity and mass media sources. It focuses particularly on the decades since the educational reforms of the 4th Labour Government in the 1980s. The article begins by providing a brief background on educational privatisation and governance in New Zealand and elsewhere, in order to provide some context for the concerns explored in the rest of the article. It then considers policy and practice enablers of private actors related to national ideologies and those of key demographics where long-held beliefs support private actors despite various commitments to public provision. The significance of national politics and policy shifts in formal and party-political senses are discussed next, including ways that enactment of policy has opened up new spaces for private actors with indirect and …

This chapter provides a local vernacular analysis of recent education privatisations in Aotearoa New Zealand. Specifically, it examines contemporary charitable activity in the New Zealand state schooling sector, and its emergent impact on schooling policy trajectories and effects. A focal point is the discursive manner in which it is possible for charities to have become softly incorporated within the language, practices and relations of state schooling policy networks, contributing to what Ball and Junemann conclude is a new form of education governance. The chapter discusses the key vernacular dimensions of state schooling in New Zealand that have lubricated changing views of the boundaries between 'public' and 'private' goods. Education organisations in New Zealand, especially the that are registered charities, are made viable and visible by partnering with a messy mix of organisations across multiple sectors …

Early career researchers are critical to an innovative, connected and equitable research sector in Aotearoa New Zealand. It takes a long time to grow research capability and significant investment. Yet it can also be lost abruptly. This discussion paper outlines some facts about the ECR population in Aotearoa, highlights some of their key issues and concerns, and provides discussion points for how to safeguard roles and support early career researchers in the current COVID-19 situation.

This paper is a critical reflection of a critical ethnography, a study focused on how ‘healthy lifestyle education’ programmes were implemented and experienced in two primary schools. In an attempt to disrupt the status quo I employed a range of ethnographic methods: ‘hanging out’ with children and adults; building trusting relationships; having research conversations with participants; observing children and adults; and, journaling. However, the messy assemblage of diverse organisations, people, relations of power, discourses, truths, and practices, resulted in the emergence of ethical and methodological conundrums, including how to represent children’s voices, whether (or not) to ‘intervene’ during problematic pedagogical moments, and how to ‘act’ as a critical ethnographic researcher in schools. Applying a critical lens to my own methodology helped to ensure that I embarked on a continuous, reflexive process …

Teacher professional learning provides opportunities to enhance understandings and practices for those directly involved in children’s learning. The expectations placed on providers of professional learning are frequently shaped by mandates beyond their control and or expertise. In this paper, we examine how the complex set of philosophies framing Sport New Zealand’s Play.sport initiative, a school‐based programme to enhance experiences in Physical Education (PE), Physical Activity (PA), Physical Literacy (PL), play and sport for young people, were understood and enacted by professional learning providers. The implementation framework centred on a workforce of Facilitators, Mentors and Activators providing professional learning in participating schools. Empirical evidence was gathered from interviews, field/meeting notes and observations to illuminate how the workforce consistently grappled with layers …

As governments around the world have sought to align their education systems with the desire to be economically competitive, we have seen the rise of what has become known as the ‘Global Education Reform Movement’, or GERM (Sahlberg, 2011), a widely used acronym given to international neoliberal reform of public education. These large-scale education reforms began in the 1980s and were based on four principles: competition between schools will improve students’ outcomes; schools need greater autonomy to be able to compete; parents should have greater freedom to choose the school they want their child to attend; and, the public needs to be able to compare measures of student achievement via a single national curriculum (Levin & Fullan, 2008). These are principles strongly underpinned by key tenets of neoliberalism: market-based notions of efficiency, effectiveness, uniformity, accountability, proficiency and performance. Because the GERM takes a somewhat different form in different countries, depending on their politics, culture and history, it may be preferable to talk of ‘GERMs’ rather than a single GERM. Nevertheless, wherever an ‘infection’ has occurred, the GERM has significant implications for both the work of teachers and for students’ learning (Sahlberg, 2006). Even though some manifestations of the GERM may have had some positive outcomes for some students (eg a greater focus on learning and assessment), there have also been a number of unanticipated, indeed ‘dangerous’, effects for schooling. There is not scope in this

This chapter explores how public health is being constructed, implemented and given meaning within organised sport. Departing from the fact that civil society’s involvement in attaining government objectives on physical activity participation is often carried out by voluntary sports organisations, the chapter examines the Swedish Sports Confederation’s (SSC) role and position in this work. By interviewing SSC representatives and national sports organisations’ (NSO) general managers, this chapter shows how discourses on democracy, equality and physical activity are used to legitimise the SSC’s role in public health and how such discourses pose challenges for organised sport in meeting public health objectives.

In New Zealand, obesity is still big news. Young people's fat bodies in particular continue to be positioned as a problem that requires immediate attention and intervention. A selection of recent headlines gleaned from the news Web site Stuff. co. nz demonstrates some of the current concerns in New Zealand about children's bodies and behaviours: Lack of childhood obesity programmes as the weight continues to rise, Kiwi kids destined for shorter lives than parents, and Obesity epidemic at crisis point. The moral and medical panics over obese'couch-potato kids' have resulted in an avalanche of policies and practices, many of which target schools. The government's Childhood Obesity Plan is a prime example. Out of 22 initiatives, eight specifically focus on education: Sport in Education; Play.

The emotions of young people have gained increasing attention, both globally and in Aotearoa New Zealand, through their position within the contemporary notions of mental health and, more recently, wellness. Although it is important to support young people’s health and wellbeing, we argue that the attempts to make children’s emotions ‘well’ may work in favour of burgeoning mental health and ‘troubled person’s’ industries’ (Gusfield,.Social Problems 36:431–441, 1989)—but not necessarily the needs or ‘wellbeing’ of young people.

The starting point of this book is that providing nutritious food for children in school is a way to address social inequities and inequalities, not just for children who may be going hungry but by producing spaces that create commensality. Food in schools is a matter of social justice and involves a complex network of political actors and economic demands. However, in neoliberal times and contexts, school food provision has led to erring on the side of ‘efficient’school meal programs that are not necessarily socially agreeable, palatable, pleasurable, nutritious, sustainable, or educational.
Food practices in schools may act as a means for social reproduction and normalization, inclusion and exclusion, alienation and discrimination, empowerment and oppression. School meals may be a space for (re) creating and maintaining (in) equities, and injustices. Concurrently, the planning and execution of school meals, including deciding on menus and procuring the food, may also become a site of social struggle and resistance. The contents and implementation of school meals are often points of contention among the different stakeholders (students, parents, teachers), not only related to the rights of children and youth (for example, regarding their use of what is viewed as free time or personal preferences) but also regarding ideas around education (whether school meals should be pedagogicized or remain a moment of freedom).

As we struggle to understand the changes brought upon us by the current climate and environmental emergency and the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is difficult to envision what the future of school food looks like. Although we have once again confirmed that inequality is at the root of health conditions and diseases, many governments and multilateral organisations around the world continue to ‘look the other way’. Inequitable outcomes for some populations are still positioned as either part of the ‘natural order’of the world, as well as seen as merely symptomatic of one’s moral failings and inability to take responsibility for themselves. The way that people’s food ‘choices’ and body size have been blamed for contracting (or even dying from) COVID-19 (eg Batterham, 2021; Gillam, 2020; Kamyari et al., 2021) is just one grotesque example of how the ideologies of neo-liberalism and healthism work to shift our attention away from the powerful politics of health (and education) inequities and towards individual blame, stigma, and shame (see Pausé, Parker & Gray, 2021).
Political and academic debates have focused on the impact of school closures–to prevent coronavirus transmission–on the mental health and wellbeing, and educational achievement, of children and young people. Similarly, discussions on poverty in relation to nutritional status have been politicised, and at times corrupted. The attention of school food programs has remained on providing a source of energy, at the very least, in lower-and middle-income countries, and healthy nutrition in some higher-income countries. However, as students return to in-person classes …

In 2018, when we first started to develop the idea for this edited volume, we were cognisant that the term ‘critical obesity studies’ was problematic. This was mostly due to the fact that we did not really know – or certainly could not easily define – what ‘critical obesity studies’ means or not. As we wrote in our proposal to the publisher, we did not necessarily see even our own work as ‘critical obesity studies’, but understood that our work – and others – contributed to this ‘field’, for want of a better word. Alongside the interesting problem with the word ‘critical’, we wanted to provide a breadth and depth of critical thinking and critical theory on ‘obesity’, a book that did not adhere to one critical orientation (e.g., poststructuralism) or that focused on a single issue or topic (e.g., education, fat studies or public health). Ultimately, we wanted to present a range of critical issues, theories and perspectives, and we wrote in our …

The point of this chapter is to disrupt the ‘truth’ that food marketing contributes to childhood obesity by critically examining how certainty about this relationship is (re)produced through expert knowledge and the unquestioning acceptance of the ‘junk food marketing = childhood obesity’ discourse. My aim here is to illuminate how dominant obesity discourses work to produce ‘regimes of truth’ about the relationship between food marketing and childhood obesity; how expertise, power, knowledge, and discourses congeal and cohere to (re)produce the taken-for-granted assumption that junk food marketing = childhood obesity. In a similar vein to Gard and Wright’s critique of ‘certain’ obesity discourses in physical education, my central concern is how scholars – particularly in the field of public health – contribute to the dismantlement of uncertainty (with respect to knowledge about the relationship between ‘junk’ food …

We are a diverse collective of researchers who are committed to improving the health and wellbeing of marginalised individuals. This article is a response to, and critique of, the DentalSlim Diet Control research. This device revises a controversial 1970s weight-loss technology connected to poor health outcomes, which is indicative of a culture that consistently promotes harm to fat and other marginalised communities.
We address the historical context in which unruly bodies, particularly fat, and Indigenous bodies have been the site of unethical investigation conducted under the auspices of medical research. Existence outside the normative white, male, cis physical ideal demands regulation, and disciplinary measures. We demonstrate how Brunton et al.'s research is underpinned by anti-fat attitudes and assumptions which impose this punitive physical intervention onto healthy people in a way that should not be …

Could the next generation of researchers be lost in the aftermath of Covid-19  

Covid-19 could erase the next generation of New Zealand research leaders, write a group of academics who’ve been looking into the issue.

This chapter details the ways in which Michel Foucault’s theoretical work on government and governmentality is a productive way to analyse nutrition policies and practices that seek to change the behaviour of citizens. We take an international perspective on the analysis of nutrition strategies to consider how schools enact health initiatives in response to concerns about childhood obesity. We analyse school nutrition projects in New Zealand and the United States for points of convergence in their form, influence, and effect. Ultimately, we understand these school nutrition interventions as projects that are in line with Foucault’s description of governmentality. Such governing strategies rely on various normalising systems of power to shape conduct in specific ways. We argue that school nutrition initiatives serve as an arm of governmental rule to shape the subjectivities and the moral conduct of children and their …