Critique of Obesity Assemblages and Surveillance in Schools by Emma Rich - Book Report/Review Example

Critique of “Obesity assemblages and surveillance in schools” by Emma Rich Emma Rich, eminent and educationist at Bath has expressed her concern and explored the role of multiple agencies in establishing the current obesity assemblages’ in schools, which she considers detrimental to the students’ psyche, as expounded by her in this article. With particular focus on the situation in the United Kingdom, she has conducted a qualitative analysis of the factors responsible for the current scenario. Citing the growing propensity of surveillance practices, which became available only recently due to the spurt in IT based technological tools’, and which she believes are being used rather overzealously, the author has criticized the manner in which the data is collected and manipulated by a multitude of government as well as other agencies to make hypothetical suggestions for improvement. Such suggestions’ she believes, enforce a mindset on the target population and shape the future of a society in a misdirected endeavour of false expectations of betterment. She has focused particularly on how highly idolized standards in terms of human shape and form are being inflicted upon the future generation of students’, claimed to be suffering from the so called ‘obesity epidemic’. As regards Kamberelis and Dimitriadis approach to research for this kind of a qualitative inquiry, the author has employed the IIIrd chronotrope, that of "Skepticism, Conscientization and Praxis". The author has aptly employed the IIIrd chrontrope as she has provided substantial published as well analytical evidence for proving that the obesity epidemic has been overhyped and overt consideration for these criteria to evaluate health through meaningless measurements has been relied upon. This is exemplified in her statement, "My intention in this paper is to gain a more complex purchase on how we might conceptualise obesity surveillance circulating in schools" (Pg.804). Her scepticism of this notion has been fortified with examples and statements of affected women evaluated in this study. She believes that health is an individual aspect and different people are subject to different criteria of health depending upon their genetic potential as well as social and cultural influences. Good health is an overall phenomenon where the abstract psychological influences of well being also need to be taken into consideration. Her praxis is reflected in her views that assemblages need to consider broader criteria for well being of the youth and concentrate on only the relevant aspects. Dividing youth as fit and unfit solely on the criteria of being overweight or at risk of obesity may not always be true as life processes and time can affect their health status which is a continuous process spread over time. Conscientization of her viewpoints is evident as she has tried to awaken the pertinent experts to the reality of the situation as it’s exists at the time of publication of her article. In her own admittance she has employed the Haggerty and Ericson’s concept of ‘surveillant assemblage’ to determine how surveillance practices in schools combine and contribute to an assemblage established by numerous agencies and organizations to achieve an obscure picture of the actual antecedents contributing to wholesome health. The multiplicity of factors affecting the psyche of the young women examined in this study is reflected in their recorded statements which show how the surveillance techniques used outside and inside school impacted their understanding of the relationship of body with food (Pg. 805). The author contends that aetiology and development of eating disorders is more related to formal education and wider social practices relevant to the multidimensional nature of young peoples lives. The author has built this study on the basis of her opinion that recent prevalence and the quantitative spurt in surveillance studies has delved deep into collection of statistics and personal data of people in society upon which all sorts of conclusions can be drawn depending upon the kind of analyses the data is subjected to. Within the school context, the author contends that such surveillance mechanisms have focused on collection of children’s weight and health data, the analysis of which has led to the framing and implementation of curricula and pedagogies directed towards handling to what she claims has been wrongly identified as the ‘obesity epidemic’. The severity of this conceptualization is such that national policies have been framed by national bodies in England and Wales which are responsible for children’s’ health as well as education. Targets have been assigned to contain the obesity epidemic within a specified time frame with experts harbouring the fear that the present generation of children under 11 years of age may not live as long as their parents. The matter has achieved such serious proportions that interventionist policies are being suggested, which include adaptations in school health and physical education policies and more drastically, removing obese children from their parent’s custody to social care facilities. A variety of surveillance techniques are being employed at schools in which their eating habits and lifestyle are monitored, direct measurements of their physical characteristics are made, dietary constraints enforced and a number of electronic gadgets used to measure their physical activity. The author insinuates that this amounts to a biopolitical culture of social governance by the authorities concerned, but at the same time contradicts that if this insinuation was correct it would reflect the determinism that has been associated with the epistemology of social control. In a milder note, she visualizes that biopedagogies can be better comprehended if examined through more experimental and interdisciplinary perspectives. The methodology employed by the author to fortify her contentions about the issue have been based primarily upon qualitative data garnered from a wider project which incorporated education, disordered eating and obesity discourse as its primary features, and which was conducted over a span of three years involving 40 young girls and women who were being treated for various anomalies associated with disordered eating at a central location in England. All participants were White and the age group ranged between 11-18 years, which fairly represented a specified group from the well educated middle class as well as other sections of society. Eating disorders ranged from bulimia to anorexia nervosa and they were able to convey their ideas and reflections about their experiences of mainstream schooling. The information was gathered with a design to garner the total information of the impact surveillance activities at school exerted on their eating patterns with incorporation of information about their social history and family background as well. For generation of qualitative data, the author encouraged active involvement of the participants through journal keeping, participation in activity based tasks, drawing tasks and semi-structured interviews. Parents of the participants were also interviewed in an effort to obtain a wider perspective and healthcare professionals’ viewpoints were relegated to a secondary status as their opinion was considered biased due to the emphasis which they professionally associated with the ‘disordered eating behaviour’ as a psychological disease or condition. The author’s aim thus appears to be focused entirely upon the conceptualization of the affected subjects’ own opinion of the impact surveillance activities’ at the educational institutions were exerting on their respective personalities. The author has conducted a critical analysis on what she believes is a contentious issue i.e. the overzealous belief in the presence of a global obesity epidemic, which has been claimed to pose a serious health risk for the younger population. Despite the claims and declaration of such an epidemic by as eminent an organization as the WHO (World Health Organization), the author claims that studies have been conducted which have yielded information about the inconclusiveness of such apprehensions. She has enumerated several studies conducted in recent years which pinpoint at the nuances of moral panic, disaster and disease which have come to be associated with the word ‘obesity’. Governments, health organizations, families and individuals have become thoroughly obsessed and preoccupied with the idea of maintaining an appropriate ‘weight’ rather than an actually healthy body. In the United Kingdom, the government has identified the younger population as the ideal target for preventing obesity and as a result has framed policies in tune with such a design and assigned the responsibility to the Department of Health (DoH) as well the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF). This has resulted in schoolchildren being subjected to a range of surveillance procedures after framing of this policy in 2004. The author believes that such surveillance procedures are congruent with her assessment of them on the basis of Foucaults’ panopticon in which they operate to regulate the bodies of children through health discourses. She claims that ‘self-regulating subjects’ are produced as a result of the overemphasis on health discourses’ which ultimately result from such surveillance activities. The author has clarified that an educational institution in itself is not solely responsible for this sort of surveillant activities but gets involved in the processes initiated at a larger organizational level involving governmental organizations and the general concepts and perceptions circulating within society. Moreover she believes that technological innovations in recent years have promoted the collection and digitization of physical data from students in schools which is utilized as an informational tool to satiate the requirements of contemporary Governance. Such body specific data obtained through innumerable biometric measurement tools yields information which does not reflect the true persona of an individual, focussing rather exclusively on physical aspects. The author believes that the complex flow of information about the body parameters and the pedagogical and individual practices resulting thereupon enforce functions on children’s bodies which are not actually desirable. A student labelled as overweight or at risk of suffering from obesity therefore automatically becomes vulnerable to the mental and social trauma of being considered abnormal. This initiates a desire to regain the prescribed health status in terms of physical figures alone, which is not the actual and entirely appropriate health status. The author has then gone on to elaborate upon the significance of conceptualization and consideration of ‘obesity surveillant assemblages’ as a distinct entity as against the exclusive role of school surveillance activities in the actualization of obesity related concerns. She has substantiated her views through the analysis of other authors working on the subject claiming that connections formed with other groups, institutions, individuals, organizations and bodies collectively constitute an assemblage which promotes the overall activity. The author has envisaged looking exclusively at the surveillance aspect from within such assemblages. She has laid particular emphasis on Haggerty and Ericson’s concept of ‘surveillant assemblage’ which has been claimed to standardise the capture of information flow from the human body in a manner which makes it purely informational, yielding mobile, comparable data. Such ‘surveillant assemblage’ has been described by the author to possess a ‘rhizomatic’ character i.e. being interconnected to various locations instead of possessing a centralized structure. As a result, numerous agencies and factors contribute towards the functioning of such an assemblage. It becomes difficult to identify the actual processes and phenomenon interacting with each other to produce an effect due to the limitlessness of their entities. Surveillant assemblage, the author contends is therefore a confluence of myriad factors contributing towards its rhizomatic character, which leaves room for incorporation of political agendas and aspirations enjoying popular support as an ulterior motive of a governing authority in its aim of fulfilling what it conceives as favourable and desirable social objectives within a society, neglecting the actual needs of a child which might be necessary for development of a better personality, which was in first place the actual reason for the surveillance. Welfare policies derived after consideration of data obtained from such assemblages are directed towards steering the society towards a direction which is supposed to satisfy the criteria of what is considered as ‘good’ for the society. Social control is therefore a resultant action of the mutual conditioning of synoptical forces and panoptical desires along which such surveillance assemblages are built. The author has then gone on to explain how the obesity control policies in the UK have affected the society and youngsters in particular ever since it has been recognized as a social problem in the year 2004. Programmes such as Every Child Matter (ECM) were developed and agencies such as the healthcare and the education departments were required to act in an integrated fashion to provide for wholesome development of children. Targets and outcomes for organizations and individuals were fixed and newer technologies introduced to monitor and regulate risk factors for the protection of youngsters. Integration between various agencies was felt necessary for surveillance activities leading to identification of ‘safe’ and ‘at risk’ children. The NCMP programme necessitated the need for measurement of weight and other body parameters of children falling in the age groups of 4-5 years and 6-11 years. This emerged as an offshoot of the surveillance programme which dealt with obesity. BMI (Body Mass Index) was incorporated as a necessary body measure and the data collected was made available for institutional and parents’ perusal so that necessary lifestyle changes could be initiated. Obesity was identified as an existing epidemic, the contributory factors being linked to societal and cultural influences as well as financial status of parents. The socio-technological data generated thus was considered a feedback mechanism for reformative agencies and other organizations shortlisted for providing solutions and remedies. The author then cites the personal experiences of the girls involved in this study and based upon their opinions prepares ground for the dehumanizing effect such surveillance assemblages exerted on their lives. Predefined criteria of ideal weight, BMI and other body parameters forced concern on the teachers as well students identified to have abnormal physical parameters, forcing them to change their feeding habits or indulge in exaggerated physical activities to bring their weight up or down in accordance with the prescribed standards for their age. This not only placed physical stress but also doubts about self in affected students who otherwise might have been considered healthy if not subjected to the confines of predetermined physical standards. Moreover, genetic variations and propensity for early puberty in some which made them heavier than their contemporaries put additional pressure on some of the participants in this study. The author therefore promotes the notion that a more wholesome viewpoint of what is considered as good health should be envisaged which considers aspects which have been neglected due to exclusive focus on obesity. The human body cannot be visualized as a mere instrument governed by specified criteria for its appropriateness. The author concludes her article by emphasizing that a disordered relationship exists between what a youngster construes as ‘private troubles’ in relation with the ‘public issues’ of contemporary assemblages prevalent in schools regarding obesity. Such assemblages exert psychological stress on the students. However, the author believes that the issue cannot be viewed within these narrow confines as a multiplicity of factors, some hitherto unrecognized affect the total scenario. She recommends further research into this aspect in an endeavour to develop better body pedagogies. Reference Emma Rich (2010): Obesity assemblages and surveillance in schools, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23:7, 803-821 Read More