Childhood obesity, corporate philanthropy and the creeping privatisation of health education

Abstract

Childhood obesity, corporate philanthropy and the creeping privatisation of health educationConcerns about a global childhood obesity crisis have led to a proliferation of primary school-based health education policies and practices. What is surprising, however, is the recent explosion of 'obesity prevention' programmes and resources that are devised, funded, and implemented by multinational corporations and marketed to schools as 'health education'. In this article I draw on two corporate anti-obesity/health education programmes that are promoted to primary schools in the United Kingdom and Canada. Drawing on Foucault's notion of governmentality, I examine how the 'problem' of childhood obesity has become an opportunity for corporations and other institutions to govern children. In particular, I interrogate how specific technologies of government -privatisation, corporate philanthropy and multi-sector partnerships -align with the neoliberal political rationality. I also argue that even though the explicit aim of corporate 'anti-obesity' programmes is to help 'educate' children to make healthy lifestyle choices, they actually work to position children as self-governing citizen-consumers and attempt to transfer the responsibility of children's bodies and health onto children themselves. I suggest further research is necessary to understand how children and teachers experience these various programmes and how corporate anti-obesity curricula play out in primary school contexts.

The outsourcing of health and physical education

“…Of the seven publications that employed this method, the documents sourced included field notes, 23 evaluations, 21,22 and corporate resources and websites. 12,13,18,29 This latter data source, that is, digital media, was rarely engaged with as either a source of data or a data collection method. One approach to researching digital media prevalent in the broader education literature, which could be considerably generative in regards to the outsourcing of HPE work, is network ethnographies (Ball and Junemann, 2012;Howard, 2002) and the construction of network diagrams (Hogan, 2014).…”

“…4 In addition, one publication mapped the services that are available to schools 13 and a number of articles sought to evaluate or critically engage with some of the 'solutions' that external agencies were providing. 18,[29][30][31] Secondly, there were several articles present in the corpus of publications which, while not explicitly focused on the outsourcing of HPE in schools, did engage with the implications of outsourcing in their findings. These included, for example, publications on generalist teachers' knowledge, experiences, perceptions, and challenges of teaching HPE, 6,8,[19][20][21] where the 4…”

“…1,5,7,12,13,18,19,21,23,25,29 Although several papers did make reference to broader neoliberal ideologies, just one publication specifically located their work in relation to market discourses transforming the HPE space. 13 In those papers which sought to understand outsourcing decisions and motivations, theoretical approaches included applying the economic concept of supply and demand 5 , using subject epistemology to explore curriculum delivery and staff allocation 7 , and considering teachers' pedagogical decision-making in relation to Shulman's (1986) concept of pedagogical content knowledge.…”

“…19 Research which focused on experiences of outsourcing included publications that treated data as both accounts-of-practices and practices-inthemselves 1 as well as those that drew on Foucault's concept of governmentality to examine how external providers govern both teachers 12 and students. 18,29 These articles tended to be those that were more recently published, with advances in theoretical frameworks since the initial empirical work potentially offering the prospect of moves towards more wide-ranging and robust understandings of outsourcing.…”

Biopedagogies and Indigenous knowledge: examining sport for development and peace for urban Indigenous young women in Canada and Australia

“…In the context of a neoliberal performative culture (Rich & Evans, 2009), we would argue that for SDP interventions, like other programs targeting young people (Powell, 2014), a key component is directed at shaping 'good' bio-citizens (Halse, 2009) who have the knowledge and the desire to make decisions that will enhance their health. As is the case with other SDP elements, the emphasis is on individual responsibility for change rather than addressing structural disadvantage or cultural diversity (e.g., see Hayhurst, 2013).…”