ABSTRACT
How are the voices of young people shaped, privileged or marginalised in the practices of education and schooling? How do pupils deal with the normalising expectations and requirements of performative culture and obesity discourse? Can they evade, accommodate or recontextualise relentless and penetrating surveillance of their bodies in school time and space? If we are to begin to understand such processes we need to press beyond analyses of the intrinsic content of obesity ‘messages’ to consider ‘the voice’ of education itself and how it is shaped by the pedagogic device (see Figure 1, p. 23): ‘a grammar for producing specialised messages, realisations, a grammar which regulates what it processes: a grammar which orders and positions and yet contains the potential of its own transformation’ (Bernstein, 1990: 190). ‘Obesity discourse’ nurtures a language, grammar and syntax with regulative and instructional principles and codes which define thought and action; or, in Bernstein’s terms, a ‘meaning potential’ for ‘health’ largely in terms of weight, size and shape, where the solution to ‘problems’ is a matter of weight loss through taking more exercise and eating less food. This language relates to global trends and issues shaped and formed through contemporary policy and pedagogies on education and health and embodied in and voiced through the actions of young people in and outside schools. Focusing on these relationships, we can demonstrate how ‘the voice’ of health/education policy articulated through a language of ‘performativity’ creates a culture which inadvertently endorses actions (such as those voiced by Tracey, above) that are damaging for some young people’s education and for their health.
