The political is critical: explorations of the contemporary politics of knowledge in health and physical education

Abstract

This special issue has been conceived to acknowledge the advances in inquiry and understandings that political and critical scholarship has facilitated. Perhaps more importantly, it seeks to reveal the limits of contemporary ‘political’ and/or ‘critical’ research in the field and encourage fresh thinking about a number of issues, including not least, the relationship between political and critical research. In our editorial we highlight a number of key questions that have guided our thinking about the state of critical scholarship and ways of working to continue to engage with critical questions.

Keywords:

• Socio critical
• Health and physical education
• Politics

Since the publication of the first issue of Sport, Education and Society (SES) in 1996, the journal has extended production almost year on year to accommodate an increasing volume of submissions. In part, this growth in the number of issues has reflected a parallel growth in research that has pursued ‘critical’, social and/or political agendas spanning education, physical education, health and sport. While SES has by no means been the only outlet for such work, it remains a journal that invites empirical and theoretical contributions that extend insights into the political, social, and cultural dimensions of contemporary policies and practice. Twenty years on from the inception of SES, it is timely to look afresh at the ways in which the field is engaging with the politics of education, sport, health, and research. This special issue has been conceived to acknowledge the advances in inquiry and understandings that political and critical scholarship has facilitated. Perhaps more importantly, it seeks to reveal the limits of contemporary ‘political’ and/or ‘critical’ research in the field and encourage fresh thinking about a number of issues, including not least, the relationship between ‘political’ and ‘critical’ research. More specifically, we have been prompted to ask:

How sophisticated are the theoretical perspectives and concepts that research is currently employing?

• What possibilities and limitations do theoretical perspectives currently being employed in the field present in terms of the lines of inquiry that they prompt and enable us to pursue, particularly in relation to issues of equity (see also Evans & Davies, 2017).

• What questions do they generate, for example, about our understandings of difference and/or the ways in which particular conceptualisations of difference are embedded in policy and embodied in pedagogical practice? What are the categories, constructs and mechanisms that frame our perceptions of ‘normal’ and ‘other’?

• What insights do they generate about the power-relations at play across and beyond education that impact matters such as, how different young people feel about their bodies and their participation in physical activity, and/or the ways in which ‘difference’ is experienced and can be expressed?

• What do we know about the ways in which official curriculum texts, accepted pedagogical practices, and forms of assessment, variously reaffirm particular power-relations and therefore, the acceptance of particular knowledge and in turn, patterns of inequity in education, health, sport and society?

We hope that individually and collectively, the papers in this issue provide a foundation for the sort of ‘sceptical scrutiny and sustained questioning’ (p.?) that Gard and Pluim (in this issue) call for. This statement itself leads to questions about what issues should be the focus of scrutiny and sustained questioning, how such research can be advanced, and why we see a need for it.

At a glance, and particularly in the light of recent political developments internationally, we might suggest that much has changed in global politics since 1996. Yet, as several of the papers in this collection remind us, continuities are as important for us to consider as (apparent) changes. Further, we suggest that such exploration is particularly important in order to generate counter discourse amidst for example, claims that significant advances have been made in relation to inequities in physical education, health or sport. To a great extent, therefore, this issue is a prompt for the field to keep questioning the premises and assumptions that lie behind and inform policy development and that are used to legitimate current practices. We aren’t on our own in pursuing this goal. Since the original idea for the Special Issue a number of papers and books have been published with similar intentions (see for example Azzarito, Macdonald, Dagkas, & Fisette, 2016; Felis-Anaya, Martos-Garcia & Devis-Devis,2017; Leahy, Burrows, McCuaig, Wright, & Penney, 2016).

Overview of papers

Katie Fitzpatrick and Lisette Burrow’s paper examines the critical ambitions of health education curriculum policy in Aotearoa New Zealand that require teachers and their ensuing pedagogies place diversity and young people at the forefront. In reviewing curriculum ambitions they question the extent to which the such ambitions, laden with critical promise, can be realised in a political climate that relies so heavily on a representations of youth as ‘at risk’. They highlight several tensions, paradoxes and fissures that arise when what they state to be an avowedly socially critical syllabus collides with broader public health imperatives so heavily imbued by neo-liberalism. Fitzpatrick and Burrows draw on Bourdieu to explore two ‘health’ contexts, obesity and sexuality, to interrogate how health education exists at the intersection of different fields of practice and what this means for the realisation of socially critical curriculum ambitions.

Dawn Penney’s paper draws on a paper by Ball (1998) to highlight the need for critical scholarship in physical education to not merely seek to present alternative ‘solutions’ to the policy problems that the field and those within it are variously presented with, but to start by questioning what are presented as the ‘important problems’, and how and why they come to be accepted as such. Penney introduces the concepts of policyscape and policy magic to reveal more about contemporary policy development in physical education and as tools for future critical policy research to employ. In the second half of her paper Penney draws on insights from recent research and Bernstein’s (2000) work to explore the role of boundary maintenance and boundary dissolution in the ‘policy magic’ that she associates with both notable changes and important continuities in contemporary physical education. The paper provides a reminder that critical scholarship needs to focus on actively defining the policy problems ‘that really matter’ in physical education and for society.

Wellard and Secker explore the complexities and contrasting visions and interpretations of concepts such as physical literacy and well-being and the relationship between these, as they are constituted by the three ‘interested’ groups—government agencies, academics and educators—in two government interventions for children's wellbeing. They examine the consequences of these disparate visions for the implementation and assessment of the success of interventions designed to improve children’s health. They conclude by arguing for the value of multiple visions of well-being as a way of prompting reflection and maintaining debate about the way PE is perceived and taught in schools.

Michael Gard and Carolyn Pluim’s paper asks the question ‘Why is there so little critical physical education scholarship in the United States’ and uses a case study of Fitnessgram as a way to try to tend to this question. They begin their paper with an interrogation of what actually constitutes ‘critical scholarship.’ They then turn to briefly describe the contemporary landscape of physical education research with a focus on how it is often preoccupied with questions of what works in schools. The authors then focus on reviewing the scholarship of Fitnessgram, emphasising the increasing influence of various webs of connection between academics, professional organisations, corporations, funding agencies, and publishing outlets. They provide several examples from conference abstracts and leading HPE journals to highlight their contention. From their analysis they argue that there is an overall lack of critical scholarship in the field. Government mandates for schools are left simply waiting to be translated into schools, without any counter-balancing scepticism related to the interpretation of research findings.

Amanda Croston and Laura Hill’s paper reports on research that has pursued how ability is defined and practised in physical education. Underpinning this research is the intention that enhanced understanding of processes that actively sustain the notions of ability that are currently privileged and deemed legitimate, can point us to means via which other definitions may gain legitimacy. Utilising Bourdieu’s (1977) concepts of habitus, field and capital, Croston and Hill reveal a crucial interplay between teachers’ habitus and values, their constructions of ability and expression of those constructions in ‘ability-based’ practices that reaffirm the authority of forms of embodiment that align with notions of sporting excellence. While they identify that the inherent flexibility of policy texts presents the potential for the exploration of discourses that align with broader conceptualisations of ability, their data highlights the depth of assumptions that sustain narrow definitions and underpin established practices. The paper represents an important contribution to a line of research that undoubtedly needs extending. It is with sadness and regret that we acknowledge the passing of Mandy Croston and loss of a scholar committed to the pursuit of equity in physical education

In the paper, ‘Up against whiteness’ rethinking race and the body in a global era, Azzarito, Simon and Marttinen describe how they partnered with physical education teachers to implemented a Body Curriculum, ‘conceptualized as both a visual technology and a virtual pedagogical site’, designed to assist ethnic minority students challenge the taken-for-grantedness of the white body as the ideal media representation of health and physical attractiveness. They used the affordances of Glogster, a software programme to engage in socio-critical pedagogy which encouraged students to engage with media representations of healthy bodies and to post and comment on alternatives. They use a discourse analysis of the students’ postings, to investigate how ‘the students negotiated, took up, rejected, and challenged media narratives of fit bodies through their self- representations’. In their paper they conclude that while students’ postings provided the means to destabilise the meanings associated with the dominance of white bodies in the media. At the same time however they point to how the power of media representations produced conflicted responses where the students continued to privilege white bodies as the expression of fitness and health.

In his reflections on the papers in this issue Juan-Miguel Fernandez Balboa considers the difficult question of why the socio-critical agenda, from his perspective (and others—see Macdonald, 2014), has been so unsuccessful. An analysis of the papers in the special issue provides the means to compare the more numerous and arguably more publicly powerful strategies employed to achieve neoliberal ends with those strategies employed by socio-critical scholars. He goes further than this comparison, however, to argue that both those espousing a neoliberal agenda and those countering it lack a crucial characteristic necessary for ‘authentic’ change. Inspired by the philosophical teachings of Ouspensky and more recent scholars espousing similar positions, he argues that a first step is work on the ‘self’. He argues that action in the name of social justice needs to be underpinned or preceded by ‘a hard and honest inquiry’ into the deeply entrenched and much reiterated credos of the socio-critical agenda. Only through such self-examination, he suggests, can ‘one achieve the genuine and legitimate levels of wisdom and compassion needed to attempt any mindful and effective change toward justice’ (p.)

Together the papers in this Special Issue highlight some of the different theoretical and methodological approaches to critical scholarship. The papers draw on these different approaches to interrogate questions of policy, curriculum, race, gender, ability, the body and wellbeing as a way of shedding light on difficult critical questions and practices that continue to trouble us. While at times it might feel as if we are locked inside a ‘critical’ echo chamber tending to what Berlant (2011) would refer to as a cruelly optimistic project, the papers in this Special Issue and the work of many others in the field suggest that there are spaces for what Youdell (2011) refers to as micro victories. We also agree with Fernandez-Balboa (this issue) that the critical project is a troubled one, but we argue that it is a necessary project requiring sustained attention and reflection, including a process whereby we turn our critical gaze on ourselves and question our own usual theoretical suspects. It is necessarily a collective endeavour and the papers in this Special Issue contribute valuable insights and reflections on the critical project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.