ABSTRACT
The contemporary child is at risk of countless unseen dangers, while burdened with the responsibility for assuming the skills and knowledge necessary to achieve economic and social success (Nadesan, 2010: 19). It follows that schools are critical sites for the management and promotion of hygienic, safe, compliant, disciplined and healthy bodies. In keeping with a view of physical cultural studies (PCS) that embraces transdisciplinarity (Silk and Andrews, 2011), this chapter sits at the interface of philosophy, sociology and pedagogy to explore the normalizing of bodies in schools. It is also consistent with the intellectual project that is PCS, imbued with a desire to create the type of knowledge that might mobilize progressive social change (ibid.) with, by and for young people in schools. Our aim in this paper is to illuminate the school’s potential as both a site of physical culture injustice and of empowering forms of corporeal knowledge and understanding (Andrews, 2008). We will do so through a discussion of how various scholars have arrived at particular understandings of the corporeal practices, discourses and subjectivities through which young bodies become civilized and represented in schools, and the presentation of data we have recently generated within a larger project looking at the ‘health work’ undertaken in schools (Macdonald et al., 2013–2015).
