Session Information
08 SES 01, Governance and Governmentality in ESD and Health Education
Paper Session
Contribution
The neoliberal turn in education has resulted in a number of reforms which have blurred the boundaries between corporations, schools, government institutions and the voluntary sector (see Ball, 2012). One reform that represents a significant shift in the way health education curricula and programmes are funded, created, distributed and implemented is the increasingly common use of corporate philanthropy. Multinational food and drink corporations are ‘gifting’ a plethora of health education resources and programmes to primary schools in Europe and across the globe. These resources and the corporations who create them are promoted to policymakers, teachers and children as ‘part of the solution’ to childhood obesity. This paper examines how concerns about childhood obesity have created a space that is now being colonized and exploited by the private sector. I will illuminate how the philanthropic funding of health education materials is not simply a means to provide solutions to social ‘problems’ (i.e. obesity and education), but is a business strategy designed to increase the corporation’s bottom line.
In this paper I connect the corporate philanthropy strategies of the world’s largest multinational food and drink corporations to an array of health education curricula and programmes being taught across the globe. I will also identify key similarities in these corporate obesity solutions, in particular the dominance of healthy lifestyle discourses which re-position the complex issue of obesity as simply a problem of individual irresponsibility and immorality.
In this research project I have used Foucault’s notion of governmentality as a theoretical framework to explore my research questions of why corporations are funding, creating and providing ‘anti-obesity’ programmes to primary schools, and how children, teachers, principals, and other adults who implement these programmes experience and understand them. Governmentality provides a suitable framework for analysing the micro practices, power relations and lived experiences of subjects and the macro practices, “aims and aspirations, the mentalities and rationalities intertwined in attempts to steer forms of conduct” (Huxley, 2007, p. 187). Furthermore, I have used Foucault’s concepts of truth, power-knowledge, discourse, and governmentality as both an analytical ‘toolkit’ and theoretical framework to explore why these corporate programmes are implemented, how they govern individuals, and how certain kinds of knowledge about obesity, health, education and corporations are reproduced through these corporate health education resources and attempt to produce thinner, healthier, consuming citizens.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Clandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Coveney, J. (2006). Food, morals and meaning: the pleasure and anxiety of eating (2nd ed.). Oxon, UK: Routledge. Fitzpatrick, K. (2010). Stop playing up! A critical ethnography of health, physical education and (sub)urban schooling. (Doctoral dissertation, University of Waikato). Retrieved from http://researchcommons.waikato.ac.nz/handle/10289/4429 Heywood, L. (2007). Producing girls and the neoliberal body. In J. Hargreaves & P. A. Vertinsky (Eds.), Physical culture, power, and the body (pp. 101-120). Oxon, England: Routledge. Huxley, M. (2007). Geographies of governmentality. In J. W. Crampton & S. Elden (Eds.), Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography (pp 185–204). Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. King, S. (2006). Pink ribbons, Inc.: Breast cancer and the politics of philanthropy. Minneapolis, MN: Univerity of Minnesota Press.
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