Embodying policy concepts

Abstract

This article introduces some of the key concepts that we have used in our research to help illuminate the multiple and different ways in which apparently ubiquitous health policies relating to obesity, exercise, diet and health are mediated and shaped both globally and nationally, as well as within regional, school and other contexts. The analyses suggest that concepts drawn from the work of Basil Bernstein, if suitably refined and combined with those of other social theorists of policy, may prove particularly useful when investigating the constantly shifting relationships between discourse, knowledge and bio power and the pedagogical and policy processes that occur within and between relationships of this kind. The article foregrounds the importance of concepts emplacement, enactment and embodiment and the transactions they represent. Taken together these concepts add nuance and sophistication to understandings of relationships between discourse, policy, in situational activity, subjectivity and actor differences without, however, being sufficient to explain why health education policies, pedagogies and the subjectivities they affect/effect, are configured in particular ways in specific national, regional or school settings. Achieving this, we suggest, requires that we further explore how these surface features of policy (emplacement, enactment, embodiment) are shaped, structured and regulated in situ by underlying processes involving the intersection of the pedagogic and corporeal devices.

Keywords:

• policies
• pedagogies
• enactment
• emplacement
• embodied subjectivities
• social reproduction

Notes

1. The UK research project, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, involved a diverse population of young people (n=1156) from across eight schools (three primary, two middle and three secondary) and were representative of the ethnic and social class composition of the UK Midlands county in which the study took place. Our previous research centred the lives and school experiences of some 40 young people suffering from eating disorders, work reported in Evans et al. (2008).

2. We acknowledge Dillabough's (2009, p. 223) argument that theory itself ‘impacts on the formation of knowledge about young people’ and are acutely aware that the concepts and ‘theory’, outlined in this article, derived largely from Bernstein, themselves may help constitute a particular view of youth or teacher culture and embodiment. They are not, however, used to ‘signal allegiance to particular mentors’, or to ‘position ourselves in the field’ but rather as Dillabough suggests, as a ‘mediating device’ (p. 223) to assist us to understand and interpret why it is that teachers and young people act, think and speak in the way that they do about their bodies, health and related matters in and outside schools. Our problematic is the corporeality of subjectivity and how we might best illustrate conceptually and empirically the intersections of biology and culture.

3. There are synergies here with Stones (2005) notion of a ‘structuration cycle’ which centres relationships between external structures (of a context) and internal structures (phenomenological conditions of an individual's mediation of external structures), active agency and outcomes. However, his conceptual frame, like others mentioned in this paper, offers limited means of articulating how such relationships are encoded, shaped and embodied; transactions better captured, in our view, in Bernstein's work via concepts of the PD and CD.