Session Information
08 SES 13 A, Expectations of Health Education: The Nexus between Policy and Practice
Symposium
Contribution
This paper is an attempt to engage with how a small cohort of young people from two New Zealand primary schools understand public health agendas in and beyond the school gates. Drawing on interview material from a broader ethnographic study investigating the place and meaning of health and physical activity in young people’s lives, we investigate how these young children make sense of what they see, hear and come to know through public health messages, and with what effect for how they come to think of their ‘selves’, their relations with others. We suggest that notions of young people as social actors, ideas about young people’s agency, their capacity to disrupt normative notions of what and who they should be, are evident in the testimonies of the young people in our project. In so saying, we also suggest the claim that young people are ‘doing it for themselves’ is possibly misguided given the weight of contemporary public health imperatives bearing down on their youthful, lives. The potential for doing it for oneself is inevitably contoured by the discourses one has available to draw on and, in contemporary times, it is a rare young person who can resist public health imperatives.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
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