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Whilst other sporting narratives of girls and women from the Global North have been well explored, there is limited research about girls from a Fijian background. Furthermore, within this ethnic/cultural group, their diverse voices are not well understood. Indo-Fijian girls who are of a South Asian background, and were born and reside in Fiji, are marginalised to a triple degree in the country's sporting platforms: they face gender inequalities emanating from a patriarchal society; secondly, they are marginalised in terms of race and ethnicity, thus not having access to the same sporting opportunities that their iTaukei (Fijian natives) counterparts do, especially in mixed-race team sports. Finally, Indo-Fijian girls are economically disenfranchised, living in the peripheries of the Global South, where they struggle with a lack of funding, inequitable policies and an unstable political climate. This triple layer of marginalisation deprives Indo-Fijian girls/young women of real opportunities and rights in the sporting fields to play sports for better health and fitness as equal Fijian citizens. This study reports on a one-year ethnographic research and presents sporting narratives of young Indo-Fijian women aged between 16 and 25 years from the capital city of Fiji. The data was collected employing photo-elicitation interviews aiming to illuminate the experiences and trajectories within formal and recreational sport and physical activity of Indo-Fijian girls. The paper draws upon critical, intersectional and poststructuralist theories to thematically analyse the data. The young women's narratives reveal that many times their athletic pursuits and passion disrupt the Fijian gender, racial and class orders as they consistently exercise their daily and sporting agency; sometimes these girls also find themselves complying with the hegemonic gender/racial order. This study amplifies local and marginalised voices of Indo-Fijian girls and emphasises the urgent need for inclusive and innovative educational pathways for Indo-Fijian girls in Fiji's schools, thus fulfilling the country's ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of the body remains dominated by Western scholars examining Western bodies and using Western conceptualisations of the body. Though mainstream sociology of the body research is founded within dualisms, often privileging one side of a binary opposition at the expense of another, a thread within Chinese philosophies cut across such dualistic categories. This paper aims to reinvigorate this thread by the 'turn to' a postmonolingual approach, using New Confucianism to consider the challenges and implications for bodily education and research in three ways. First, this paper draws on a postmonolingual lens to extend current debates and limitations of embodiment literatures. Specifically, it provides examples of how thinking with New Confucianism in educating the body could help shift the academic landscape. Second, it offers an account of navigating through the 'turns' in order to reach for the ground of New Confucianism thinking in bodily education. Thinking through a postmonolingual lens with a focus on New Confucianism indicates a departure from Western approaches that have informed a Euro-American centric tradition of research. Such a shift reorientates thinking around postpositivist research that continues to perpetuate dualism and fails to capture the complexity, ambivalence and entangled relations of our embodied lives. Last, it highlights the revelations in how Chinese philosophical concepts can bring to challenge dominant Western notions of performance culture predicated upon binary oppositions and more broadly the privilege of the body over mind and emotions. Thinking about bodily education with New Confucianism this paper points to the potential to decenter normative assumptions and reshape the usual contours of the binary bodily praxis. It concludes by considering the potential and future directions when drawing on New Confucianism as a theoretical framework to rethink bodily education and research in the West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the construction of femininity and sexuality, specifically as trans* intersect with race/ethnicity, in sport. The third author (S.F.’s) lived experiences as a Hong Kong Chinese gender-fluid bodybuilder who competes in international women’s bodybuilding contests serve as an impetus to examine cultural norming and marginalization in professional sport. Narrative analysis and autobiographical memory are used to understand SF’s construction of identities in relation to her 1 sociocultural environment and as a political process that alerts us to the power structures that permit certain stories to be told while silencing others. Specifically, this article problematizes how professional women bodybuilders are being constructed as objects that are expected to embody Whiteness and ‘authentic heightened femininity’. It highlights how the intersection of genderfluidity, race/ethnicity and bodybuilding defy dominant understandings of what is aesthetically, experientially and physically acceptable within the ‘norm’ in both ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’, and masculine and feminine worlds. The discussion aims to provide implications to moving beyond the enduring binary gendered, racialized and sexual assumptions in women sport. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an increasingly complex world marked by transnationalism and globalisation, the role of physical cultures in everyday life is undergoing change, as people with different orientations to movement and bodies, especially its dominant Western forms, negotiate their relationships to it. The examination of race in Europe and the United Kingdom (UK) in the current intellectual landscape is often located within a Black-White debate that often excludes the Chinese from any form of critical analysis. This lack of academic recognition and critical engagement is coupled with gendered and racialised British Chineseness in everyday discourses. The ambivalent positions of the hyper-visibility of high-achieving British Chinese students in educational research is in contrast to the invisibility of their other everyday lived experiences, such as physical activity, leisure, sport and health. This juxtaposition is reflected through the complexity of how discourses and practices, shaped by colonial and racial legacies, contribute to a form of Chineseness that remains 'at risk' and overlooked in research about their bodies and physicality. This paper calls for explorations of Chinese minority ethnic students' voices to set the impetus for a critical sociology of Chinese diaspora and health and physical cultures research agenda. It critically engages with the contestable work of cultural norming in relation to Chinese diasporic students' health and bodily experiences. In response to these challenges, this paper introduces the Rethinking Health Experiences and Active Lifestyles – Chinese Students (REHEAL-C) project in the UK (supported by Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship 2019–2020) as one contribution to shifting the academic landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital technologies are now considered important in shaping young people's engagement in and with health and physical activity. Recent discussions show that the use of digital technologies to track health and fitness may over-emphasize the linear understanding of the body and health generally underpinned by Western health ideologies such as healthism. Other studies have shown the increased use of digital technologies in teaching Health and Physical Education (HPE) and as a means to enhance health and increase physical activity. Despite the opportunities and risks apparent in these studies, little is known about how HPE students make choices, negotiate, and resist or embrace the digitalisation of physical activity, exercise, and more broadly health. This study examines HPE students' meaning making of risk and surveillance associated with the self-digitisation of exercise. The study further investigates how the concept of 'prosumption'; the production, curation and consumption of self-data within the context of digitised health and physical activity, is understood. Based on the findings, we have constructed a typology of prosumers that can be used as a pedagogical device to illustrate the various kinds of subject positions students take up with digital technology in health and physical activity. This study extends the current understanding of prosumers by identifying the 'ambivalent prosumer'. The results provide insights that have direct pedagogical implications in HPE teacher education specifically in the areas of knowledge production and consumption of knowledge through digital technology in health and physical activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media are influential sociocultural forces that construct and transmit information about gender, health and bodies to young people in the digital age. In health and physical activity, Chinese people are often represented and positioned differently to other (minority) ethnic groups. For example, Black young people are often understood as having low academic motivations and aspirations but as ‘natural’ athletes; in contrast, Chinese young people, seen as the ‘model minority’ who excel in STEM subjects, are fragile, reserved and disinterested in physical movements. These public forms of representation may sit in opposition to the young people’s embodied identity. When these misrepresentations are internalised, issues such as micro-aggression and racism may have an impact on Chinese young people’s health and wellbeing. This paper aims to examine how Chinese bodies are gendered and racialised in contemporary social media sites (e.g. Google News, LiveJournal, Medium, Wordpress). Drawing on critical discourse analysis and Foucault’s concepts of normalisation and discursive practice, the paper will problematise the often taken-for-granted gendered and racialised stereotypes related to Chinese physicality and health on social media sites. Implications for developing future research and teaching resources in critical media health literacy for young people on issues related to gender and equity will be provided. The results affect how we understand, represent, and discuss Chinese (young) people on social media sites, thereby how Chinese young people engage, construct, and perform their embodied identities in Western, English speaking societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research that delves into the sociocultural perspectives of health and physical education and physical activity (HPEPA) in the lives of ethnic minority students in Westernised countries is often conducted by investigators who are Westerners, native English speakers and racially different from the study participants. Limited research is conducted by researchers who have racial and/or linguistic identities similar to those of study participants, and even fewer reports include the reflexivity data of the research process. This paper draws upon my own experience, as a young Hong Kong-Chinese female Australian, of conducting research with Chinese students and their White HPE teachers in Australia. I discuss a number of aspects of the epistemological dilemmas of being an insider and outsider as a researcher, and the practical and methodological issues in recruiting participants and conducting research with them. In addition, reversing the ethnic gaze by focusing on the teachers (i.e. a young Chinese female conducting research with White teachers) can help to illuminate new perspectives on the construction of otherness and positionalities within research. The reflections add to current discourse on problematising HPEPA research in general, particularly when researching the Other. This paper concludes that an intersection of racial, ethnic, class, gender and age identity can and does have some effect on the research process, as the Chinese students raised particular questions to a young, female Chinese researcher, and they were more willing to talk about racial and cultural issues they felt I could relate to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to explore young Chinese girls’ aspirations and ideal environments for engagement in Health and Physical Education (HPE) and physical activity (PA) in Greater Western Sydney. Interviews are used to elicit these girls’ perceptions of their future and ideal environments in relation to HPEPA. Their data offer insights into key influences regarding what is thinkable, desirable and achievable in their HPEPA environments. Results showed dimensions of environments, such as social and pedagogical aspects, that are conducive to these girls’ aspirations in HPEPA (e.g. social support from parents, and functional built environment for HPE). This paper aligns with a strengths-based approach to understanding and recognising young Chinese girls’ perceived aspirations within their socio-cultural environment. In doing so, we discuss how feminism and femininity are positioned from a Chinese perspective that may provide alternative views to a post-feminist panorama in promoting advancement of all young girls in HPEPA. Results invite us to take into account some of the girls’ ambivalence towards being an ‘autonomous’ and ‘dependent’ modern Chinese young girl. This paper calls for a rethinking of how aspirations that shape young people’s future in HPEPA in much of the contemporary Western world are conceptualised in academic research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Socio-cultural theorists have argued that having a diverse understanding of subjectivities of normal/ideal bodies is important for Health and Physical Education (HPE) teachers. When teachers hold a single understanding and perception of normal/ideal bodies, such as a thin body as normal or ideal body, which are usually informed by dominant discourses, they may (re)produce narrow understandings of bodies among their students. This paper focuses on how a group of pre-service HPE specialist teachers (11 females and 3 males, aged between 18 and 26 at the time of the first interview) from an Australian university, discuss issues related to subjectivities of bodies. It draws on visual methodologies and semi-structured interviews to understand how these pre-service HPE specialist teachers construct discourses of bodies. Foucault’s concepts of normalisation, surveillance and biopedagogies are used to explore discursive constructions of bodies, with a particular focus on how some discourses are normalised via surveillance techniques. The results of the study invite us to reflect on how images may promote certain ways of thinking about and considering the body among pre-service HPE specialist teachers. In light of contradictions which were found across the comments of two participants who constructed different discourses during the interviews, we posit that making sense of subjectivities of bodies is complex and often contradictory. Furthermore, the results suggest that photo elicitation is a useful visual method for theorising issues related to bodies. Results can inform teacher education and policy in how to better prepare pre-service HPE teachers to teach about bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young people with English as an Additional Language/Dialect backgrounds are often identified in public health messages and popular media as ‘bodies at risk’ because they do not conform to the health regimens of contemporary Western societies. With increasing numbers of Chinese students in Australian schools, it is necessary to advance teachers' understandings of the ways in which these young people negotiate notions of ‘health’ and ‘(un)healthy bodies’. This paper explores the ways in which young Chinese Australians' understand health and (un)healthy bodies. The data upon which this paper focuses were drawn from a larger scale study underpinned by critical, interpretive, ethnographic methods. The participants in this study were 12 young Chinese Australians, aged 10–15 years, from two schools. Photographs of a variety of bodies were sourced from popular magazines and used as a means of interview elicitation. The young people were invited to comment on the photographs and discuss what ‘health’ and the notion of a ‘(un)healthy body’ meant to them. Foucault's concepts of discursive practice and normalisation are used alongside Chinese concepts of holistic paradigms and Wen–Wu to unpack the young people's subjectivities on health and (un)healthy bodies. The findings invite us to move beyond Western subjectivities of health and (un)healthy bodies and highlight the multidimensional and diverse perspectives espoused by some of the young Chinese Australians in this study. The research findings can inform future policy and practice relevant to the exploration of health and (un)healthy bodies in health and physical education and health and physical education teacher education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines Chinese migrant young people's lifestyles and physical activity experiences in relation to the values and cultural investments of their families in Australia. The data in this paper were taken from a larger-scale study underpinned by a critical and interpretive ethnographic method conducted in two school sites. The young people's lives were significantly shaped by dominant Chinese cultural norms and traditional notions of gender. Bourdieuian concepts are drawn upon to explain the (re)production of the Chinese young people's habitus cultivated at home. Based on the young people's pursuit of cultural capital as a consequence of familial values, discussion also focuses on the agency of these young people in relation to their lifestyle choices. Dominant discourses in the ‘talk’ of these young people included their notions of excelling, hyper-investment in academic success and, especially for the girls, skin colour and safety. Traditional Chinese family power relations limited the choices these young people had regarding physical activity which was complicated by the cultural and social fluidity of their lived experiences. The inter-generational flow of habitus and capital of these Chinese migrant young people's families tended to privilege a particular set of discourses based on gender, race, social class and hierarchical practices that resonated with traditional Confucian philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]