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Recent research has drawn attention to the culture of whiteness and Eurocentrism within post-secondary kinesiology and physical education programs. By speaking with eighteen Chinese-Canadian undergraduate students, this case study examines how Eurocentrism manifests in an undergraduate kinesiology program at a western Canadian university. We found that a subtle, yet pervasive, center–margin framework was woven throughout the teaching and research culture of the program. This binary served to legitimize Western approaches to knowing and doing health and physical activity, while marginalizing – if not excluding altogether – non-Western knowledge systems. As one possible pathway for disrupting this knowledge/power hierarchy within kinesiology, we propose building opportunities for epistemic interculturalism throughout the curriculum. We maintain that a first step towards fostering intercultural opportunities is understanding the conditions of possibility that may enable or constrain non-coercive dialogical spaces. To this end, we aspire to expose the complex and subtle everyday processes through which the hegemony of the Western tradition is reproduced, which we suggest is the most significant contribution of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though considerable resources have been allocated to the study of obesity, there is no consensus on its definition, causes, or solutions. Amidst ongoing debates over understandings of obesity, Obesity Canada (OC) was established to enhance the quality of life of Canadians with obesity through the advancement of anti-discrimination, policy change, and obesity prevention and treatment. Drawing upon a transdisciplinary social justice framework, we use critical thematic analysis to examine the OC website, which is the organization's primary knowledge mobilization platform. We will address the following research question: To what extent does OC serve social justice goals that promote the best interests of larger people? We argue that the social justice potential of OC ultimately falls short and conclude with some recommendations on how the site content could be enhanced with social justice principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the Canadian context, the physical activity levels of children and youth in the after school time period has become a source of public health concern. We argue that this concern is informed by broader public health crises, in particular the ‘global obesity epidemic’ and the closely related ‘global pandemic of physical inactivity', and that these so-called ‘crises’ operate as part of a discursive regime that serves to justify after school interventions aimed at increasing the physical activity practices of children and youth. Although the objectives of such interventions are seemingly well intentioned, we suggest that such interventions nonetheless harbor difficult to discern, but potentially pernicious consequences, for the communities in which they are implemented. We focus our attention on the place-specific effects of one Public Health Agency of Canada-funded after school physical activity intervention – After the School Bell Rings (ASBR) – that was implemented in the mostly Indigenous, northern community of Placid, Manitoba. Based on a critical analysis of the ASBR program itself, along with interviews and focus groups with children, parents and recreation providers (n = 10) from the community of Placid, we contend that the ASBR serves to govern Indigenous recreation at a distance. We argue that when implemented in the place-specific context of Placid, the ASBR functions as part of a broader governmental assemblage composed of loosely connected discourses, institutions, socio-structural conditions and individuals that, when assembled, ultimately serve to govern geographically and culturally distinct communities. We conclude by suggesting that the objectives of broad-based health interventions, such as the goal of increasing after school physical activity levels, should not be universally implemented across diverse locales, but need to account for the diverse, place-specific priorities and needs of the communities into which they are implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There has been a growing body of research exploring the mobility experiences of rural youth as they migrate in search of work, education and leisure. In this article we contribute to this body of knowledge by examining the mobility experiences of young women (16–24 years) living on the southwest coast of Newfoundland, Canada. In contrast to dominant constructions of rural crisis that position out-of-the-way places as in decline, dying or dead, we argue that the young women in our study articulated complex, affective relations to place. In so doing, they negotiated localized histories, prevailing social relations, broader discursive constructions and embodied affective connections in forging their emplaced feminine subjectivities. We argue that foregrounding the complex and at times contradictory relationships that the young women articulated with their rural homes is an important step in prying open dominant albeit constraining constructions of the rural, thereby allowing for alternative and more inhabitable imaginings of out-of-the-way places. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper we discuss how photovoice and words-alone methods used in a study with young people living in communities on the west coast of Newfoundland, Canada, helped to tell different stories of rurality. Instead of the dominant narrative of rural decline in the focus groups and interviews with youth, through photovoice young people talked more positively about their home places. Drawing on recent work on emotional geographies and combining realist and constructionist frameworks, we argue that the photographs represent culturally accepted and appropriate ways of thinking, talking, and feeling about place, and that these shared affective practices provide a sense of community and continuity in a context of uncertainty in fisheries communities. It is our contention that such shared practices offer a strategy to deal with, indeed to heal, the damaging impact of the near extinction of fisheries stocks by maintaining a stable sense of self and place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses disability studies and cyborg theory as lenses to explore the disabled body in contemporary sporting contexts and situates the reader by critically reviewing social theory. Using the case of Oscar Pistorius, a South African Paralympian, we explore how the intense scrutiny on his prostheses forecloses examining how scientific discourses are called upon as arbiters to discern the ‘truth’ of his body. Moreover, while Pistorius invariably transgresses the boundaries of the modern sporting project and liberal humanist subject, he is subjected to powerful strategies of containment and domination. Threatening to undo secure notions of humanness, we illustrate how Pistorius is both fascinating and anxiety-provoking, and renders moral angst in the public consciousness. In order to rethink the stranglehold of ability and disability in the collective psyche and ‘do’ disability sport differently, this article calls for a radical cyborg politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on qualitative interviews and focus groups with youth (12–24 years) living in rural, coastal Newfoundland, Canada, we examine how leisure practices within this context served to reproduce and naturalize localized gender relations. More specifically, we argue that the participants drew upon dominant discursive constructions of rural leisure to reiteratively enact a binary distinction between the ‘town’ as a space of constraint, youth-adult tensions, and consumerism in contrast to the freedom and privacy of the ‘woods’. This dichotomy was mapped onto gender binaries, where the town was coded as feminine and the woods, masculine. We argue that these constructions served to mark the boundaries of normative gender leisure practices in the production of embodied gender subjectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]