The Body as Territory Under Construction: Historicising Health in Chilean Schools

Abstract

Health and schools have long and deeply intertwined histories. Health has long played a key role in shaping the purposes of schooling, particularly in contemporary scenarios, where ‘health issues’, and the various initiatives in place to combat these, have reached unprecedent levels in various countries (Shilling, 2010; Rich et al., 2020). In Chile, in a context marked by high rates of childhood obesity and sedentarism (MINSAL, 2011; OECD, 2019), a series of initiatives, programs and curricular reforms have been deployed in schools, justified through the promotion of health and of holistic education.

Offering a socio-historical analysis, this thesis critically interrogates the ways in which health has been incorporated, promoted and taught in Chilean schools to achieve three key interrelated aims: a) to analyse the bodies of knowledge that have circulated in the construction and deployment of a variety of school-based initiatives in the name of health; b) to examine how particular narratives of Chilean history have informed understandings and the deployment of health in schools; and c) to analyse the ‘ways of being’ promoted to students in and through school-based health initiatives.

The research engages with Latin American theories of bodies and health to understand school health with relation to a long history of colonisation and oppression. Methodologically, a genealogy has been used for responding to these research questions, presenting these in three historical chapters that, rather than proposing a story of progress or linearity, respond to the idea that over time there are different governmental norms which organise these periods and understandings of health and schooling.

Overall, this research critically examines the ways in which health has operated in the history of schooling as a dispositif (Foucault, 1994) of colonisation, racialisation, class, and gender.