Caroline Fusco

• University of Toronto

RéSUMé: OBJECTIF: L'objectif était d'étudier le déploiement des discours sur la vaccination contre les VPH (VVPH) et leur impact sur les filles, les parents, les infirmiers/infirmières et les médecins canadiens. MéTHODES: Des entrevues ont été réalisées avec des participant(e)s (n = 146) de quatre provinces canadiennes. Une analyse poststructuralis...

Exercise has a long history as a therapeutic modality and has existed, in some form, in all cultures throughout recorded history. In recent years, therapeutic exercise has taken on new significance as a relatively low cost medical intervention designed to improve people’s health and well-being and reduce the downstream effects of comorbidity. Drawi...

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 particula...

Public health institutions in many industrialised countries have been launching calls to address childhood obesity. As part of these efforts, Canadian physical activity campaigns have recently introduced children's play as a critical component of obesity prevention strategies. We consider this approach problematic as it may reshape the meanings and...

The purpose of this study was to examine the association between the hours of outdoor play and objective measures of physical activity and identify the correlates of outdoor playing time in terms of parental perceptions of the neighbourhood environment. Time spent in outdoor play, both on a typical weekday and a typical weekend day, and neighbourho...

Public health institutions in many industrialised countries have been launching calls to address childhood obesity. As part of these efforts, Canadian physical activity campaigns have recently introduced children's play as a critical component of obesity prevention strategies. We consider this approach problematic as it may reshape the meanings and...

In 2010 the Provincial Government of Ontario, Canada introduced a new play-based learning curriculum. Educational stakeholders (i.e. teachers, early childhood educators and student teachers) have been charged with the task of implementing the play-based curriculum, which upholds children's fundamental right to play, as a means to health and well-be...

Background In many Western, industrialised countries, there are growing concerns that children are no longer playing ‘the way they used to’ and Canadian public health institutions suggest that a decline in play may have adverse health consequences for children. For instance, a continued increase in obesity among children and youth is predicted ba...

There are growing concerns in many industrialized Western societies about declining opportunities for children to play, and fears that this will have adverse health consequences for them. Informed by anti-obesity efforts, public health institutions have recently begun to advance active forms of play as a way of improving children’s physical health;...

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 conside...

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, pub...

A wide range of correlates of active school transport (AST) have been studied including demographic, individual and family factors, school factors, and social and physical environmental factors. Children's qualitative experiences of AST or non-AST have received less attention in the AST literature. This paper seeks to redress this imbalance. We pre...

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 f...

Environmental measures that are designed to facilitate changes in opportunities for active school transport (AST) do not often account for individuals’ interpretations of the built environment (BE) in different urban contexts. The Built Environment and Active School Transport (BEAT) project was undertaken to explore the ways in which the transport-...

What is it "to govern in an advanced liberal way" (N. Rose 1996, 53)? For some time now, I have been interested in questions of space and how bodies are governed, (dis)located, and (dis)placed. In a study of locker rooms (Fusco 2003), I concluded that ideologies of regimes of "healthification" (Fusco 2006) pervade fitness spaces. Healthification is...

Purpose – The purpose of the chapter is to introduce queer feminist cultural studies methodologies. For illustrative purposes, the chapter draws upon one specific study of locker room space undertaken by the author. Design/methodology/approach – The design of the locker room study is delineated, including methods of data collection and analysis: se...

Despite the benefits of physical activity for youth with congenital heart disease (CHD), most patients are inactive. Although literature has addressed medical and psychological barriers to participation, little is known about the social barriers that youth encounter. This qualitative study explored sociocultural barriers to physical activity from t...

Medical advances have reduced mortality in youth with congenital heart disease (CHD). Although physical activity is associated with enhanced quality of life, most patients are inactive. By addressing medical and psychological barriers, previous literature has reproduced discourses of individualism which position cardiac youth as personally responsi...

The potential benefits of active school travel (AST) are widely recognized, yet there is consistent evidence of a systematic decline in the use of active modes of transportation to school since the middle part of the 20th century. This study explored parental accounts of the school travel mode choice decision-making process. Thirty-seven parents of...

Active school transport (AST) may be an important source of children's physical activity (PA). Innovative solutions that increase PA time for children, without putting added pressure on the school curriculum, merit consideration. Before implementing such solutions, it is important to demonstrate that active school transport is associated with healt...

In this article, I begin to unpack how urban physical activity space is being imagined by physical activity policy-makers. I review literature pertaining to youth, urban space and play, and I engage in a preliminary analysis of a small selection of government (Canada) and media communications to examine how space and health are represented discursi...

This paper explores spatial theory, and particularly a Foucauldian analysis of space, power, and the subject, as a frame within which to examine moves toward security in North American urban schools. We bring into play empirical data from an ethnographic study of New York City and Toronto schools where policies and technologies of record-keeping, i...

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 intensi...

This article considers the interface between the (psychic and material) construction of subjectivity and the geographies of a set of physical education and recreation locker rooms. Using Julia Kristeva's (1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection, the author examines the discursive and psychic constructions of subjectivity that take place in lo...

In this article, I ask the following question: what importance does "whiteness" play in shaping the built environments of sport? I examine (a) the significance of studying space; (b) how race and space intersect; (c) how whiteness is a historical legacy of architectural modernism, the style of design that characterizes many North American and Canad...