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.

This paper first appeared as: John Evans & Brian Davies (2012) Embodying policy concepts, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 33:5, 617-633, DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2012.696497 (see https://www.tandfonline.com/). I am very grateful to Taylor & Francis for their permission to reproduce this paper in this journal.

Keywords:

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