1st Edition

New Directions in Social Theory, Education and Embodiment

Edited By John Evans, Brian Davies Copyright 2013

    This book exemplifies the nurturing spirit of inter-discursive debate with a view to opening up new theoretical and empirical insights, understanding, and engagement, with debates on issues relating to pedagogy, policy, equity and embodiment. From a variety of social science perspectives, an international force of contributors apply a multitude of concepts to research agendas which illustrate the multiple ways in which ‘the body’ both impacts culture and is simultaneously and seamlessly positioned and shaped by it, maintaining social reproduction of class and cultural hierarchies and social regulation and control. They attest that once we begin to trace the flow of knowledge and discourses across continents, countries, regions and communities by registering their re-contextualisation, both within various popular pedagogies (e.g., newspapers, film, TV, web pages, IT) and the formal and informal practices of schools, families and peers, we are compelled to appreciate the bewildering complexity of subjectivity and the ways in which it is embodied. Indeed, the chapters suggest that no matter how hegemonic or ubiquitous discursive practices may be, they inevitably tend to generate both intended and unexpected ‘affects’ and ‘effects’: people and populations cannot easily be ‘determined’, suppressed or controlled.

    This book was originally published as a special issue of Sport, Education and Society.

    1. New directions, new questions? Social theory, education and embodiment John Evans and Brian Davies

    2. Skin pedagogies and abject bodies Jane Kenway and Elizabeth Bullen

    3. Where inequality lives in the body: teenage pregnancy, public pedagogies and individual lives Wendy Luttrell

    4. Gender, visible bodies and schooling: cultural pathologies of childhood Carrie Paechter

    5. ‘Change4Life for your kids’: embodied collectives and public health pedagogy Bethan Evans, Rachel Colls and Kathrin Hörschelmann

    6. From embodiment to emplacement: re-thinking competing bodies, senses and spatialities Sarah Pink

    7. Inhabiting different bodies over time: narrative and pedagogical challenges Andrew C. Sparkes and Brett Smith

    8. Urban walking and the pedagogies of the street Alan Bairner

    9. The feel of mobility: how children use sedentary lifestyles as a site of resistance Martha Bell

    10. A meditation in which consideration is given to the past and future engagement of social science generally and critical physical education and sports scholarship in particular with various scientific debates, including the so-called ‘obesity epidemic’ and contemporary manifestations of biological determinism Michael Gard

    Biography

    John Evans is Professor of Sociology of Education and Physical Education at the School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences, Loughborough University, UK.

    Brian Davies is Emeritus Professor at the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University, UK.