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In the past decades, public health has increasingly addressed what has been called the children's obesity 'epidemic', most notably through large-scale initiatives promoting physical activity. Through a discourse analysis the current paper critically examines such efforts in Canadian and Australian public health. Public health websites in Canada and Australia were examined for information concerning children's health, physical activity and obesity and explored for how these issues were represented in the discourse. Bacchi's (2009) 'What's the problem represented to be?' approach to discourse analysis guided our interrogation of the taken-for-granted assumptions underlying Canadian and Australian public health discourse, the ideological and political influences involved in its construction, and the knowledge base upon which it rests. The article calls for critical reflection on how children's physical and leisure activities are being advanced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Working from an asset-based perspective, this exploratory, qualitative study examined local community strengths and capacities to support healthy aging in a rural community in Western Canada. The research team consisted of academic leads and a project coordinator from a Canadian university, collaborating partners from the health authority, representatives from local and regional municipal leadership, and an Advisory Committee comprising local municipal leaders, seniors' advocates, business owners, health care professionals and other community stakeholders. The findings from this study underscore five equally critical and overlapping areas of recommendations: Networking and Cross-Community Collaborations; Communications; Health and Social Care Initiatives; Transportation; and Housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health sociologists interested in how macro state influences affect micro health care practices have much to gain from meta-ethnography research. In this article, we bring together insights from two separate empirical studies on state health care services involving HIV/AIDS as a way to speak to larger issues about the organization and production of medical expertise and governance in health care systems. We use Noblit and Hare's meta-ethnography approach to bring these studies into conversation and identify six shared "organizers" of health care encounters. The organizers illustrate how state health interests operate across institutional contexts and impact the work of providers in seemingly unrelated health care settings. On the basis of this synthesis, we conclude that state interests both structure and create conflict in health care settings. We believe this perspective offers the potential to advance the goals of health sociology and the field of qualitative health research in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical qualitative health researchers typically occupy and navigate liminal academic spaces and statuses, with one foot planted in the arts and social sciences and the other in biomedical science. We are at once marginalized and empowered, and this liminality presents both challenges and opportunities. In this article, we draw on our experiences of being (often the lone) critical qualitative health scholars on thesis advisory committees and dissertation examinations, as well as our experiences of publishing and securing funding, to illuminate how power and knowledge relations create conditions that shape the nature of our roles. We share strategies we have developed for standing our theoretical and methodological ground. We discuss how we use the power of our liminality to hold firm, push back, and push forward, to ensure that critical qualitative research is not further relegated to the margins and its quality and integrity sustained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Creative Practices for People with Cancer is a research team experimenting with the popular arts for purpose of improving survivors' quality of life. Popular expressive art forms (e.g. drumming and mask-making) are assessed for their potential value for cancer survivors via surveyed team members and a "sculpting" session. Two themes, social cohesion and new self-identities, emerged from the team's experimentation with the popular, expressive arts. Our experimentation with the popular arts as embodied forms of self-exploration confirms their potential to counter the dominant ideology of cancer as associated with an inevitability of diminished bodies and attenuated selfhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]