Taking Up the Vitality Message
Health Knowledge, Feeling Good, and Pleasure in Newfoundland Children’s Drawings and Talk
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2408753 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Natalie Beausoleil, Leanne Petherick (0000-0002-4099-317X) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue | 5 |
| Pages | 407-416 |
| Publication date | 2015-10-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Culture Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1532-7086 • E-ISSN: 1552-356X |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/1532708615611722 |
| OpenAlex | W2270071976 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 38 |
Currently, in Canada and elsewhere in the West, government spending, media, and health activities focus heavily on 'lifestyles' and the 'obesity epidemic.' In the last decade, many health and education professionals in Canada have adopted policies to improve health and fitness among youth, seeing them particularly 'at risk' for engaging in unhealthy practices. Canada's Vitality message of learning how to eat well, be active, and feel good about one's self serves as the health promotion framework guiding our analysis of children's constructions of health. Adults and youth readily identify with dominant health messages related to eating and being physically active but only rarely acknowledge any sense of embodiment or feeling good. Research with adults, embodiment, and health suggests that feeling good about one's health and body is an impossible proposition as learning to care for the body is a constant and obligatory individual responsibility with limited possibilities of contentment. Health must be consistently and continuously worked at, making body-related projects a health imperative. We argue that learning how youth feel and experience health in relation to feeling good and pleasure is also imperative given the complex and contested relationships individuals have with health. Based on focus groups with 123 Grade 2 and Grade 4 students in Newfoundland, we use a feminist poststructuralist approach to examine how children understand healthy practices and messages about the ideal 'healthy' body. A thematic and performance analysis combining talk, drawings, and talking about the artistic productions reveals children's complicated relation to health and the body, where pleasure figures centrally and opens up possibilities for alternative conceptions of self and embodiment. We propose a serious investigation of children's sense of pleasure and 'having fun' as a fruitful avenue of research for critical scholars who aim to challenge dominant discourses of health and the body
Contentment · Feeling · Health education · Health promotion · Pleasure · Public health · Qualitative research · Social science · Sociology · Thematic analysis · Vitality · Diversity and Impact of Dance · Medicine · Nursing · Obesity and Health Practices · Physical Education and Pedagogy · Psychology · Social Psychology
Body Fascism
Education, Disordered Eating and Obesity Discourse
The Obesity Epidemic
Conducting focus groups with children and young people
Queer Bodies
Feminism and Youth Culture
Making meaning
On Female Body Experience
Grasping at straws
Resisting biopedagogies of obesity in a problem population
The politics of evidence on ‘domestic terrorists’
How children make meaning through drawing and play
Body-reflexive pleasures
Breaking down ‘healthism’
Producing different knowledge and producing knowledge differently’
Kiwi kids are Weet-BixTM kids’—body matters in childhood
Competing obesity discourses and critical challenges for health and physical educators
Producing the young biocitizen
Unbearable Lessons
Being Fit and Looking Healthy
Becoming “the fat girl”
The Uses of Cultural Studies
Children's Attitudes Toward People With Aids in Puerto Rico
Too much of that stuff can't be good
Multiple methods in qualitative research with children
Hearing children's voices
Embodying the Double-Bind of Masculinity
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.67 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2024 (2) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |