Doing military fitness: physical culture, civilian leisure, and militarism

Drawing explicitly upon the bodily techniques of military basic training and the corporeal competencies of ex-military personnel, military-themed fitness classes and physical challenges have become an increasingly popular civilian leisure pursuit in the UK over the last two decades. This paper explores the embodied regimes, experiences, and interactions between civilians and ex-military personnel that occur in these emergent hybrid leisure spaces. Drawing on ethnographic data, I argue that commercial military fitness involves a repurposing and rearticulation of collective military discipline within a late modern physical culture that emphasizes the individual body as a site of self-discovery and personal responsibility. Military fitness is thus a site of a particular biopolitics, of feeling alive in a very specific way. The intensities and feelings of physical achievement and togetherness that are generated emerge filtered through a particular military lens, circulating around and clinging to the totem of the repurposed ex-martial body. In the commercial logic of the fitness market, being ‘military’ and the ex-soldier’s body have thus become particularly trusted and affectively resonant brands

Berg-en-See street boys:merging street and family relations in Cape Town, South Africa

Despite a wealth of research exploring street children's lives, this has tended to focus on the micro-scale, rarely drawing connections with wider society. Yet, it is rare for street children to sever all ties with home and this paper explores these connections by taking a relational approach to the production of street life. Drawing on in-depth qualitative research with 12 boys living on the streets in a coastal suburb of Cape Town, the paper identifies that street children are part of powerful inter- and intra-generational relations that connect them to their families: interdependent but sometimes forced and contested. The paper concludes by identifying that street children are not isolated on the street, but rather positioned relationally in between street and family life building relations within and across spatial boundaries. This has implications for the way in which we conceptualise street children's lives and adds to wider theoretical understandings of childhood as relational

The governing of the self/the self-governing self : multi-rater/source feedback and practices 1940-2011

The present paper argues for a more critical contextualisation of multi-rater/source feedback mechanisms applying Foucault’s conceptual template of technologies of objectification and subjectivity/self, as they relate to a mode of “self” government that is intricately entwined with psychological knowledge and expertise. An in-depth genealogical analysis is presented that traces the genesis of two prominent forms of multi-rater/source feedback mechanisms between 1940 and 2011: the educational innovation of the T-group and the contemporary human resource practice of 360-degree feedback. We conclude that such practices have functioned to enfold individuals within relations of power and signification that impact upon individual self-governance, subjectivity, and identity. As such, the application of 360-degree feedback within contemporary organisational models is emblematic of a programme of government that relies for its effectiveness on the self-regulatory and self-developing capacities of the individual at work

Working up policy : the use of specific disease exemplars in formulating general principles governing childhood genetic testing.

Non-therapeutic genetic testing in childhood presents a “myriad of ethical questions”; questions which are discussed and resolved in professional policy and position statements. In this paper we consider an underdiscussed but strongly influential feature of policy-making, the role of selective case and exemplar in the production of general recommendations. Our analysis, in the tradition of rhetoric and argumentation, examines the predominate use of three particular disease exemplar (Huntington’s disease, Tay-Sachs disease and sickle cell disease) to argue for or against particular genetic tests (predictive testing and testing for carrier status). We discuss the influence these choices have on the type and strength of subsequent recommendations. We argue that there are lessons to be drawn about how genetic diseases are conceptualised and we caution against the geneticisation of medical policy making