The following sociologically orientated study explores how two physical education (PE) teachers at two secondary schools in North West England construct the notion of 'healthiness', and how this informs their health-based PE practice. The research process was influenced by figurational sociology [Elias, N. (1978). "What is sociology?"…

Young people are increasingly turning to social media for health-related information in areas such as physical activity, diet/nutrition and body image. Yet, there are few robust empirical accounts of the content and form of the health-related material young people access and attend to, or the health-related content they create and share.…

This article explores how our understandings of gender and Physical Education (PE) have developed since the publication of "Shaping Up to Womanhood" in 1992. I reflect back on my research which, using qualitative methodology and a socialist feminist lens, explored dominant gender relations in the teaching of girls' PE in English…

Participation in sport and Physical Education (PE) has historically been heavily gendered, and the glorification of masculinity and sporting prowess is viewed as a potentially negative influence on participation for both males and females. This paper explores male and female experiences of sport and PE to grasp how the field of physical culture…

Connections have been drawn between masculinity, muscularity and physical or social status in sport. Not only are sporting bodies often related to masculinity but also to whiteness, leading to the devaluing of Asian boys' bodies and sporting experiences. This paper draws on three British Asian teenage boys' visual and verbal narratives to enquire…

Obesity discourse provides a commonly recycled rationale for multiple, ostensibly well-intended, interventions. Formal educational settings sometimes operate as sites for these biopedagogies which putatively promote "good health" among young people as they transition to "responsible" adulthood. Yet, regulation and control, or…

This study reports on data from a larger-scale research project in one city in the West Midlands, England. The study was commissioned by the local education authority because of the rising incidence of parental withdrawal of Muslim girls from physical education. The aim was to provide evidence-based guidance to schools on improving the inclusion…

Underpinned by a Foucauldian analysis of sporting practices, this paper identifies the disciplinary mechanism of surveillance at work in competitive youth swimming. It highlights the ways in which swimmers and their coaches are subject to and apply this mechanism to produce embodied conformity to normative behaviour and obedient, docile bodies.…

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 draws on Pierre Bourdieu's embodied sociology to construct a conceptual view of gender relations in Physical Education (PE) in England and Wales as one of a cultural economy of gendered practice. The argument presented retains, considers, and applies the interdependent concepts of field, habitus and capital that lie at the heart of…