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Concerns over dwindling play opportunities for children have recently become a preoccupation for health promotion in western industrialized countries. The emerging discussions of play seem to be shaped by the urgency to address the children's obesity epidemic and by societal concerns around risk. Accordingly, the promotion of play from within the field appears to have adopted the following principles: (i) particular forms of play are critical for increasing children's levels of physical activity; and (ii) play should be limited to activities that are not risky. In this article, we argue that these emerging principles may begin to re-shape children's play: play is predominantly instrumentalized as a means to promote children's physical health, which may result in a reduction of possibilities for children to play freely and a restriction of the kinds of play designated as appropriate for physical health. We argue that within this context some of the social and emotional elements of health and well-being that children gain through diverse forms of playing are neglected. This has implications for health promotion because it suggests a narrowing of the conception of health that was originally advocated for within the field. Additionally, this reveals a curious paradox; despite the urgency to promote physical activity through play, this position may limit the range of opportunities for children to freely engage in play, in effect reducing their activity levels. We propose an example that promotes play for children and better aligns with the conception of health as outlined in the Ottawa Charter.

Believing that “place matters” to biopower and to the governance of the new public health, we examine how a children’s hospital setting might be interpreted as a biopedagogical site. We take as the starting point of our analysis a treatment room in Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids)—Canada’s largest pediatric hospital. This particular room, dubbed Cujo’s Crease Satellite Anesthesia Room, was funded by donations from Curtis “Cujo” Joseph, a former Toronto Maple Leafs goaltender in the National Hockey League (NHL). Using trompe l’œil techniques, an artist transformed the room to look like a Toronto Maple Leafs locker room. We examine the range of possible meanings that might be taken up in Cujo’s Crease, paying particular attention to the biopolitical and cultural intersections among medicine, hockey, and biocitizenship. We argue that specific visual signs are employed to mobilize the discourses required by the space: masculinity, hockey as a national civilizing project, normative bodies, health care in a neoliberal age, and the NHL as benevolent care-giving corporation. We concluded that the discursive regimes of Cujo’s Crease are not innocent but are implicated in (bio)economical and biopedagogical imaginaries that render the sick child’s body as an assemblage of neoliberalism’s biocitizenship projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of what has been termed a childhood obesity epidemic, public health institutions have recently begun to promote active play as a means of addressing childhood obesity, thus advancing play for health. Drawing on Foucault, this article problematises the way that children's play is being taken up as a health practice and further considers some of the effects this may have for children. Six Canadian public health websites were examined, from which 150 documents addressing children's health, physical activity, obesity, leisure activities and play were selected and coded deductively (theoretical themes) and inductively (emerging themes). Bacchi's () question-posing approach to critical discourse analysis deepened our analysis of dominant narratives. Our findings suggest that several taken-for-granted assumptions and practices underlie this discourse: (i) play is viewed as a productive activity legitimises it as a health practice; (ii) tropes of 'fun' and 'pleasure' are drawn on to promote physical activity; (iii) children are encouraged to self-govern their leisure time to promote health. We underscore the need to recognise this discourse as contingent and as only one of many ways of conceptualising children's leisure activities and their health and social lives more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A high value is attributed to playing, particularly for its role in children's development, health and well-being. There is a recent awareness, however, that the way children play has changed considerably over the last few decades with a decline in 'free-play' documented. In response, there has been a call to resurrect free-play. Concomitantly, public health alarms over a childhood-obesity 'epidemic' have emerged. A utilitarian conception of play has thus begun to be advanced as a means to 'fight' the childhood obesity epidemic and physical inactivity. We reflect on the fact that views of play as useful are beginning to seep into public health discourse and this may constitute a danger for the health and well-being of populations. We explore some of the popular discourses regarding play and analyse them, drawing on social theory, to describe a nascent one that involves a critical paradox. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper considers the interface between the hygienic geographies of a fitness and exercise space and the discourses of risk and subjectivity in this era of the new public health. Using an analysis of space, power and the subject, the paper assesses the ways in which subjects govern themselves and others in public health spaces through an intensification of surveillance, in order to ensure health and safety compliance. In this paper, first, I introduce the locker room as a place of health and hygiene. Second, I set out the wider context of the inscription of health on spaces and subjects. Third, I examine the relationship between discourses of risk and subjectivity and how risk discourses are fundamental to the fabrication of subjects and social life. The paper then examines, more specifically, techniques of self- and other-governance that help to inscribe and prescribe the new public health in locker rooms. Drawing on the findings of a spatial and ethnographic case study of an urban, Canadian university locker room, I conclude that the macro- and micro-politics and economics of policing public health require both the regulation of bodies and the participation of active, health-conscious citizens in order to keep (western) neo-liberal imperatives of health in place. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]