Historicising the body in school sport, health and physical education

This Special Issue offers diverse critical perspectives and analyses, bringing together a range of historical case studies of school sport, physical education and health across the twentieth century in diverse national contexts. Two significant projects, mass schooling and public health, were heavily invested in by governments around the world during this period, and both projects were central in defining and managing the bodies of children and adolescents. This collection comprises twelve papers and four scholarly interviews that engage historical questions about the role of schooling in shaping constructions of childhood(s), understandings of ‘growing up’, movement pedagogies, bodily norms, meanings around health and healthy citizenship. The diverse contexts and case studies examined, highlight that some twenty-first century discourses about ‘schooling bodies’ in and through physical education, health and sport, have much longer histories which tend to be overlooked. Individually and collectively the papers disrupt linear, progressive and teleological logics and question the presentism of our fields, highlighting that schooling the bodies of children is bound to long and complex histories that intersect with changing social norms around gender, race, class and other categories and classifications through which individuals and communities were organised. These often-overlooked histories are important in rethinking the present and in expanding the methods of sociologists, educationists and other critical scholars examining sport, health and physical education.