In today’s hi-tech world, Information and Communication technologies (ICTs) multiply the locations of knowledge production and pedagogical practices enactment (Moss, 2011), creating new educational spatiotemporal areas (Landri, 2018). In a novel fusion of the physical and the digital, where behaviours become performances (Gouck, 2018), a new epanopticism (Foucault, 2011) emerges, with bodies remaining constantly visible and visual and digital technologies enfolding life in a context, where virtuality’s non-organicity constructs new interpretations of bio-power (Lazzarato, 1997). Consequently, the discourses of well-being, healthism, and obesity crisis -aiming to a somatic acceptance through which embodied patterns and routines are embedded (Foucault, 1975)- become European Union’s (EU) new normalizing and regulatory bio-policy technologies, the alignment devices (Bandola-Gill et al, 2021) for EU’s agendas regarding its integration and the fabrication of the EU citizens not as owners of a common passport (Lawn & Grek, 2012) but as homogenized embodied subjectivities.

In Greece (2012-2017) a well-being programme called “EuZein” was integrated in Physical Education (PE) entailing the assessment of obesity amongst students, and the promotion of physical activity and healthy dietary conducts. It emanated from EU’s agendas like “Action on Mental Health and Well-being”, which incited a series of similar programmes -e.g., “The Children’s plan” (England) or “EPODE” (France)- testifying, thus, how the recontextualisation of well-being, health and obesity crisis discourses to educational practices and corporeal pedagogies promote the construction of a Europeanized educational embodied subject.

We study EuZein’s official site and social media accounts as an expansion of the traditional educational space, investigating how EU’s discourses of healthism and well-being -with health interpreted as an issue of individual responsibility and care (Tinning, 2014), and well-being reduced to body's shape and weight (Leow et al, 2014)- construct new PE contexts, reorient PE’s somatic knowledge and (re)shape students and PE teachers’ subjectivities. We claim that via Web2.0 apparatuses, certain notions of the body are endorsed, specific PE's orientations and emphases are promoted and specific techniques of the self are made available (Foucault, 1988) not, simply, to endow subjects with aptitudes but to modify their mode of being (Gordon, 2009).

By focusing on the regulative nature of EuZein as somatic pedagogy, functioning in a context not only of a totally pedagogised society (Bernstein, 2001) but of a somatic society (Turner, 1992) that becomes a somatically pedagogized society, we unveil the intertwining of the discourses of obesity, well-being, and sanitized bodies (Foucault, 2004) with the fundamental EU’s technologies of performativity, accountability, and standardization and their impact on the Greek PE field. We highlight how these discourses -expressed in official, scientific, and popular texts, reports, and EU’s agendas re-orient Greek PE’s somatic knowledge and how data, algorithms, e-learning platforms, and the digitized development of activities like EuZein become the new instrumentations of its governance (Landri, 2018), shaping, analogously, PE partakers’ subjectivities.

We highlight EuZein as an example of the inscription of the values of somatic education initiatives into individuals’ bodies via their platformisation (Grimaldi & Ball, 2021), interpreted as the construction of algorithmic edifices of somatic knowledges and digitized corporeal pedagogies. We claim that inside the programme’s e-spaces pedagogical and somatic discourses are merged pressuring individuals to develop utilitarian corporealities and to restructure themselves as competitive and compliant to EU’s dominant discourses subjects (Rich et al, 2019). The well-being and non-obesity norms promoted by the programme’s e-spaces aim to regulate subjects so that they fit within the EU social, educational and economic agendas (McLeod & Wright 2016). By creating explicit visibility of specific somatic knowledges, they (re)mould students’ and PE professionals’ consciousness to embrace a Europeanized embodied subjectivity, characterized by an economically beneficial health, and an individualistically interpreted well-being. 

For our analysis we combine Bernstein’s (2001) totally pedagogised society, referring to the construction of the new social via pedagogical relations and practices and Turner’s (1992) somatic society, which results from the new imaging of the body and the consumerism around it. Their combination helps us interpret the bio-social dimensions of body pedagogies (Evans, 2009) like EuZein, how they pedagogize bodies so as to be decreed as factors of health and well-being and contributors to financial success and personal happiness (Turner, 1992) and how they construct a Europeanized totally somatically pedagogized society. A society which emerges through the anatomo-politics for the individual pedagogized body that re-define the bio-policies for the regulation of the social body of the populations (Turner, 2008). Totally somatically pedagogised society complements Foucault’s (2004) notion of governmentality to explore the mixture of state and market rationalities, discourses of healthism and well-being, and self-care and anti-obesity techniques outlining the e-governance of the extended field of PE. We study EuZein’s social media and official sites, considered as spaces establishing and articulating discourses (Peters, 2009), with a mixture of discourse analysis tools, exploring the power-knowledge-ideology dynamics that delineate the procedures of discourse production and non-discourse practices’ constitution in them (Irving & English, 2018), and visual analysis tools; the latter studying the ways in which the visible becomes socially visualized in PE’s new digital spaces that “emphasize the epistemology of seeing” (Landri, 2018), and functions as discourse and practice (Azzarito, 2010). We seek to identify the organizational principles and truth claims in EuZein creating concrete, tangible effects on the constitution of subjectivities (Peters, 2009). We elucidate how its digital spaces become locations of EU’s bio-policy technologies aiming to mentalities and corporealities so as to create an embodied subject (Foucault, 1975). By identifying the shifts in the materiality of the PE field’s governance (Landri, 2018) and the utilization of its new extended e-spaces as part of the digital tools for the “building of a resilient Europe” (EU’s Digital strategy), we highlight the transformations of PE’s pedagogic discourse and somatic practices. By exploring the new digitized technologies of bio-power and techniques of the self that the programme makes available, we identify the ways in which the discourses of obesity crisis, well-being and healthism invade as body pedagogies the extended by ICTs and Web2.0 PE field intensifying, thus, the demands for governing one’s own body during the construction of their Europeanized subjectivities.

The paper contributes to the debate about global health and well-being discourses in a context of a Europeanized education, their recontextualisation in education policies as well-being and anti-obesity initiatives, their impact on the shaping of the Greek PE’s field and the subjects they construct, in an era of virtualized bodies and new digitized forms of education governance (Landri, 2018, Grimaldi & Ball, 2021). Our studying of the spatial, temporal, and discursive configurations of EuZein’s educational e-platforms (Grimaldi & Ball, 2021) and social media pages highlights the strenuous demands placed on PE’s field to embrace new educational tools and practices transforming, hence, the orientation of the somatic knowledge inside the field, as well as its governing. It unveils the interweaving of the imperative EU’s neo-liberal discourses of performativity and perfection modes (Evans et al, 2009) with the new governance of the field creating new subjectivity positionings for PE teachers and students (Ozga, 2012). The investigation of EuZein’s presence on social media and its exploitation of ICTs and Web2.0 devices reveals a digitized bio-pedagogy that, extending the educational time and space of traditional schooling, aims to enforce a normalized individual body and to regulate populations’ lives through this normalization (Donzelot, 2005). The study elucidates how new educational e-spaces, complementary to the traditional school’s sports hall, result in new conceptualisations of PE and contribute to the decentering of PE teachers and students’ subjectivities (Leow et al, 2014) in a networked world of increased connectivity and relationality (Grimaldi & Ball, 2021),. Finally, the analysis of data collected through EuZein’s social media and official site helps deepen our exploration of the discourses of health and wellbeing as Europeanizing concepts, since they stand in the intersection of the work-education-citizenship’s complex, implementing, thus, a somaticised “European idea” (Lawn & Grek, 2012) and constructing an embodied Europeanized subject.

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