Health promotion viewed as processes of subjectification in the education of Danish Social and Healthcare Workers

Abstract

This article explores how health promotion is practised within a specific educational setting: the Danish Social and Health Education Programme. Here, health promotion is formally conceived as a strategy aimed at citizens – not at the students themselves. However, the students are generally perceived as being incapable of taking care of their own health and therefore also as being too far from the role model figure inherent in the discourse of professional health promotion work. Practices targeting students' physical health are induced both in- and outside the curriculum. Based on empirical analysis and post-structuralist theory, the article explores the processes of subjectification that result from the practices of health promotion within this particular educational setting. The article reveals how health promotion is transformed into an educational technology and is thus utilised to solve problems of both a social and moral character. It is shown how health promotion has a thorough impact on the students' possibilities of coming into being as (professional) subjects. The article points to the conclusion that in this particular educational setting, health promotion constitutes subjectification processes that lead to both inclusion and marginalisation and to empowerment and de-empowerment.

Keywords:

• health promotion
• subjectification
• problematisation

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank editors Betina Dybbroe and Linda Andersen as well as Mari Holen, Agnete Neidel and Birger Steen Nielsen (Roskilde University) for their useful comments on this article.

Notes

¹ In this concrete project the students were not individually chosen for participation – the entire class participated and the students were not asked if they wanted to join that particular class at the beginning of the project – they were informed that they were going to be part of the project and that participation involved fitness training three times every week during the school period of the project.