The importance of the Physical Education (PE) teacher's body, particularly for teaching PE, has been highlighted in literature. PE teachers are expected to be clear role models to students through their acts, behaviours and bodies. However, their strong embodied subjectivities, particularly those related to their teaching practices, may be…

Policy agendas for early childhood education in the UK as in many countries elsewhere are driven by expectations that play will impact positively on a child's educational attainment, health and well-being. This paper focuses on health knowledge, social class and cultural reproduction within early year education in England, looking specifically at…

In this paper I call for "new forms of thinking and new ways of theorizing" the complex relations between the biological and social in sport and physical culture. I illustrate the inseparability of our biological and social bodies in sport and physical culture via the case of exercise and female reproductive hormones. Inspired by…

This article sets out to show how physiological knowledge about sex/gender relates to power issues within sport. The sport physiology research at the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences (Swedish acronym: GIH) during the twentieth century is analysed in relation to the political rationality concerning gender at GIH and within the Swedish…

The body has become a vital research object in several disciplines in recent years. Indeed, in the social sciences and humanities, a corporeal turn in which embodiment has become a key concept related to learning and socialisation is discussed. This cross-disciplinary paper addresses the epistemological question of how we know what we know and…

This article explores a number of insights generated from a three-year ethnographic study of one university setting in England in which a "jock culture" is seen to dominate a student campus. Drawing on core concepts from Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of culture, it illustrates the unique function of the body in sustaining jock culture…

This paper adopts a narrative perspective on the study of mid-life experiences in sport. Different types of stories about sporting mid-life are identified and discussed. Drawing upon the concept of narrative mapping, the potential of these stories to serve as narrative maps for those approaching mid-life is considered. Data from an interview study…

This paper examines the problem of delivering a body of knowledge based on biomedical research as a school physical education discourse. The paper attempts to deconstruct the ideology of healthism upon which the discourse is based in order to show how ascetic practices in school physical education are promoted as a way of combating the hedonistic…

This paper explores the perceived benefits and challenges of sport, recreation and physical education participation of culturally diverse adolescent girls and boys who are recent arrivals to Canada. The aim of the research was to further our understanding of the attitudes and experiences of English as a second language (ESL) students. Following…