TY - JOUR
T1 - Students’ health engagement and affective relations in Danish upper secondary school
AU - Vitus, Kathrine
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - To increase our understanding of the dynamics of young people’s embodied engagement in health, this article analyses Danish upper secondary school students’ understandings and practices of health and the role of the school environment in these dynamics. Participatory, visual and narrative data were collected during fieldwork with 37 students aged 16–17. Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of the body is applied to analyse the affective relations and emerging body-health assemblages within the students’ school life, which generated force and vitality (here conceptualised as health). Through becoming within sensuous, social and political body-health assemblages, the students attempted to curb school stress, sustain social belonging in an individualistic school environment and both reproduce affirming power discourses and subvert their territorialisation. The study proposes an analytical shift in perspective on young people’s health away from an individualistic ‘components approach’ towards a relational understanding, and suggests that students’ health at school relates to collectivity, quality, rhythm and co-produced engagement, rather than individuality, quantity, rules and performance, which increasingly characterise Danish health discourse and school policy.
AB - To increase our understanding of the dynamics of young people’s embodied engagement in health, this article analyses Danish upper secondary school students’ understandings and practices of health and the role of the school environment in these dynamics. Participatory, visual and narrative data were collected during fieldwork with 37 students aged 16–17. Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of the body is applied to analyse the affective relations and emerging body-health assemblages within the students’ school life, which generated force and vitality (here conceptualised as health). Through becoming within sensuous, social and political body-health assemblages, the students attempted to curb school stress, sustain social belonging in an individualistic school environment and both reproduce affirming power discourses and subvert their territorialisation. The study proposes an analytical shift in perspective on young people’s health away from an individualistic ‘components approach’ towards a relational understanding, and suggests that students’ health at school relates to collectivity, quality, rhythm and co-produced engagement, rather than individuality, quantity, rules and performance, which increasingly characterise Danish health discourse and school policy.
KW - Body-health assemblages
KW - Deleuze and Guattari
KW - becoming
KW - school environment
KW - visual and narrative methods
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85045251554&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/13676261.2018.1461201
DO - 10.1080/13676261.2018.1461201
M3 - Journal article
SN - 1367-6261
VL - 21
SP - 1250
EP - 1266
JO - Journal of Youth Studies
JF - Journal of Youth Studies
IS - 9
ER -