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Many public health interventions encourage healthy behaviours by strengthening health norms within schools or workplaces. Such health norms and health-normative contexts can also produce social hierarchies and forms of othering, including unhealthy 'deviant' behaviours. This article aims to better articulate how deviance is produced in a health normative school context. We approach the interplay between a health-oriented environment and deviance from a practice theoretical perspective, emphasising four different facets of this perspective. This paper is based on a case study in a school that has a strong orientation towards healthy eating, drawing on observations, focus group discussions with children, interviews and a survey (forty students, aged 10–11). We analyse how strong norms on healthy behaviour depend on the meticulous guarding of boundaries with deviant behaviours as well as, in some cases, associated 'others'. The article thereby promotes a practice theoretical approach on deviance emphasising the mundane character of healthy eating in school. We contribute to the debate on deviance and norms as to better understand healthy eating practices by distinguishing four different facets of a practice theoretical approach: 1) practice as distinct entity 2) the performance of practice 3) practices in a nexus of multiple practices and 4) individuals as nodal points of practices. The results assist in critically reflecting on assumptions upon which many public health interventions are built as well as contributing to an understanding of normativity and deviance in mundane practices such as snacking in school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the use of e-cigarettes, or vaping, as a social practice. It builds on recent work which argues that theories of social practice can provide effective new ways of conceptualising and responding to public health challenges such as smoking and sedentariness by shifting the focus from individual behaviour. Instead these theories attend to the development and persistence of practices which are enacted across time and space. The article draws on data from a 2014 online survey of Australian vapers, specifically responses to open-ended questions about vaping and its place in daily life. It highlights the way vaping has been established as a practice through a range of factors including the increasing burdens of smoking and the online availability of e-cigarettes and vaping information and advice. Most survey respondents were positive about vaping and constituted it as the opposite of smoking in its ability to improve well-being and transform life for the better. In contrast to smoking, vaping was presented as a practice which opened up space and time, for example as inside the home became a location where nicotine could be consumed. The article also examines the way vaping enables nicotine addiction to be experienced differently, as a form of habitual consumption in which elements of control and choice remain present. The article is limited by its reliance on written responses and the non-representative nature of the survey sample, however it suggests the benefits of naturalistic research on vaping as a social practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explore the relational dynamics of alcohol consumption by university students, drawing on qualitative interviews with fifty undergraduates in Victoria, Australia. We argue that university drinking is a social practice comprised of a bundle of activities that operate together to reinforce excessive consumption. Drawing on a distinct version of social practice theory, we conceptualise drinking as an organising principle of university social life with interacting elements – meanings, materials and competences. The meanings of drinking include cultural conventions, expectations and socially shared meanings that alcohol is central to student life. Materials of drinking include objects and infrastructures such as, beverage choice, drinking venues and mobile phones. Drinking competences include managing bodily effects of alcohol but also social relationships while consuming alcohol. The distinct social practice perspective we utilise can assist public health to address the interrelated dynamics of alcohol consumption as a social practice, with its own trajectory into which students are recruited and become carriers of the practice while at university. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Psychological understandings and individualistic theories of human behaviour and behaviour change have dominated both academic research and interventions at the ‘coalface’ of public health. Meanwhile, efforts to understand persistent inequalities in health point to structural factors, but fail to show exactly how these translate into the daily lives (and hence health) of different sectors of the population. In this paper, we suggest that social theories of practice provide an alternative paradigm to both approaches, informing significantly new ways of conceptualising and responding to some of the most pressing contemporary challenges in public health. We introduce and discuss the relevance of such an approach with reference to tobacco smoking, focusing on the life course of smoking as a practice, rather than on the characteristics of individual smokers or on broad social determinants of health. This move forces us to consider the material and symbolic elements of which smoking is comprised, and to follow the ways in which these elements have changed over time. Some of these developments have to do with the relation between smoking and other practices such as drinking alcohol, relaxing and socialising. We suggest that intervening in the future of smoking depends, in part, on understanding the nature of these alliances, and how sets of practices co-evolve. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of taking social practices as the central focus of public health policy, commenting on the benefits of such a paradigmatic turn, and on the challenges that this presents for established methods, policies and programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Lifestyle interventions often fail to successfully reach individuals with lower socio-economic status (SES), possibly because of the individual behavioural orientation to health behaviour and because limited research has included the target groups’ perspectives in the development of interventions. Certainly, in order to make lifestyle interventions more applicable, target groups’ viewpoints should to be taken into account. In order to tailor an effective lifestyle intervention to groups with lower SES of different ethnic origins, 14 focus group interviews were conducted with Turkish, Moroccan and Dutch male and female groups. The target groups’ responses highlight their viewpoint and their dilemmas with regard to physical activity behaviour and healthy eating. Exploration of the target groups’ behaviour in terms of their own logic revealed three prominent themes. Firstly, some individuals find it difficult to maintain healthy eating habits and regular physical activities, as their concept of a healthy life comprises competing values and activities. Secondly, social norms and social practices of others influence health behaviour. Thirdly, respondents’ answers reflect how they deal with the dilemma of competing values and norms. They use different ways of reasoning to make sense of their own (health) behaviour. Taken together, the results of this study suggest that considering physical activity and eating as collective social practices rather than as determinants of health will provide new opportunities to initiate healthy lifestyles and to make lifestyle interventions more applicable to target groups’ realities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In public debates about the volume of food that is currently wasted by UK households, there exists a tendency to blame the consumer or individualise responsibilities for affecting change. Drawing on ethnographic examples, this article explores the dynamics of domestic food practices and considers their consequences in terms of waste. Discussions are structured around the following themes: (1) feeding the family; (2) eating ‘properly’; (3) the materiality of ‘proper’ food and its intersections with the socio-temporal demands of everyday life and (4) anxieties surrounding food safety and storage. Particular attention is paid to the role of public health interventions in shaping the contexts through which food is at risk of wastage. Taken together, I argue that household food waste cannot be conceptualised as a problem of individual consumer behaviour and suggest that policies and interventions might usefully be targeted at the social and material conditions in which food is provisioned. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]