‘But your body would rather have this …’: conceptualizing health through kinesthetic experience

Abstract

This article provides an empirically grounded analysis of how children and adults kinesthetically recontextualize standardized, official health messages into personally meaningful, context‐specific health knowledge. The in‐depth interview research uses grounded theory methodology to analyze transcripts and a sociology of childhood framework to design a child‐centered methodological tool for collecting data with young children. Analysis demonstrates the need for further child‐centered research regarding children’s cognitive and experiential understanding of current health regimes, and discusses implications of theorizing recontextualization processes with a kinesthetic lens. Research findings include a warrant for further investigation of the biopolitical relationship between health promotion and the social body that attends to the experiential aspects of advancing moralizing health messages.

Keywords:

• grounded theory
• sociology of childhood
• health promotion
• poststructural analysis
• sociology of the body
• recontextualization