Managing Uncertainty: Obesity Discourses and Physical Education in a Risk Society.

PHYSICAL education; EXERCISE; PEDIATRICS; OBESITY; CHILDREN'S health; BODY weight

This paper considers the role of physical education researchers within current public concerns about body shape and weight. Using Ulrich Beck's notion of `risk' it examines how certainty about children, obesity, exercise and health is produced in the contexts of `expert' knowledge and recontextualised in the academic and professional physical education literature. It is argued that the unquestioning acceptance of the obesity discourses in physical education helps to construct anxieties about the body, which are detrimental to students and silences alternative ways of thinking and doing physical education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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