‘I'm Proud to Be Me’: Health,Community and Schooling

Abstract

Health reportage in New Zealand's popular and professional media regularly features large, avowedly inactive, indigenous and/or ‘poor’ people failing to nurture their children properly on account of their size. While well-meaning government and school-based initiatives explicitly target these so-called ‘high-need’ communities, seldom is there any considered understanding of what the young people consigned to these groupings understand as good ‘health’ nor the variety of ways in which they take up imperatives designed for them. Drawing on ethnographic work across two New Zealand school sites I explore the ways children are making sense of and responding to new health imperatives, given the very different material conditions and interests that contour their positions within cultural and class groupings. Analysis suggests that children can and do critically interrogate the veracity of dominant discourses, reassess them, reconstruct existing knowledge and read corporeality and admonishments to move and eat in particular ways through cultural lenses that, in some cases permit them to retain some sense of themselves as ‘well’, and in other cases, do not. Some ‘youth’ (cultures and class positions) are ‘abjectified’ while others are empowered and endorsed by prevailing healthscapes and their recontextualisation though the practices of schooling and family life.