‘Change4Life for your kids’: embodied collectives and public health pedagogy

Abstract

Recent work in human geography has begun to explore the fluidity of bodily boundaries and to foreground the connectedness of bodies to other bodies/objects/places. Across multiple subdisciplinary areas, including health, children's and feminist geographies, geographers have begun to challenge the notion of a singular, bounded body by highlighting the importance of, for example, relations of care and intergenerationality to everyday embodied experiences; remembered past/anticipated future bodies to self-perception and body image; affect/emotion to the production of embodied collectives; and connections to distant and proximate others to understandings of embodied rights and responsibility. In this paper we will review these areas of work in order to explore the ways in which this geographical work on embodied connections might contribute to recent debates concerning public health pedagogy and the production of embodied and emotional collectives in education. This will involve an analysis of the recent anti-obesity Change4Life campaign in the UK; used in this context as a way to explore how the campaign attempts to produce healthy bodies through a form of pedagogy which is centred upon notions of embodied connectivities and collectives.

Keywords:

• Embodiment
• Relationality
• Intergenerational
• Obesity
• Geography
• Change4Life

Notes

1. For the purposes of this paper we are focusing specifically on the campaign in England since parts of Change4Life are different in Wales (www.wales.gov.uk/Change4Life ). Northern Ireland and Scotland have different, yet related campaigns called, respectively, ‘Get a Life, Get Active’ (www.getalifegetactive.com) and ‘Take Life On, One Step at a Time’ (www.takelifeon.co.uk/).