Wiltshire G R, Fullagar Simone, Stevinson Clare
University of Bath, Bath, UK.
Loughborough University, UK.
Sociol Health Illn. 2018 Jan;40(1):3-17. doi: 10.1111/1467-9566.12622. Epub 2017 Oct 8.
Critiques of public health policies to reduce physical inactivity have led to calls for practice-led research and the need to reduce the individualising effects of health promotion discourse. The purpose of this paper is to examine how parkrun - an increasingly popular, regular, community-based 5 km running event - comes to be understood as a 'health practice' that allows individuals to enact contemporary desires for better health in a collective social context. Taking a reflexive analytical approach, we use interview data from a geographically diverse sample of previously inactive parkrun participants (N = 19) to explore two themes. First, we argue that parkrun offers a space for 'collective bodywork' whereby participants simultaneously enact personal body projects while they also experience a sense of being 'all in this together' which works to ameliorate certain individualising effects of health responsibilisation. Second, we examine how parkrun figures as a health practice that makes available the subject position of the 'parkrunner'. In doing so, parkrun enables newly active participants to negotiate discourses of embodied risk to reconcile the otherwise paradoxical experience of being an 'unfit-runner'. Findings contribute to sociological understandings of health and illness through new insights into the relation between health practices and emerging physical cultures, such as parkrun.
对旨在减少身体活动不足的公共卫生政策的批评引发了对实践导向型研究的呼吁，以及减少健康促进话语个体化影响的必要性。本文旨在探讨公园跑（一项越来越受欢迎的、定期的、基于社区的5公里跑步活动）如何被理解为一种“健康实践”，使个人能够在集体社会背景中践行对更健康生活的当代渴望。我们采用反思性分析方法，利用来自地理位置多样的、以前不活跃的公园跑参与者样本（N = 19）的访谈数据，探讨两个主题。首先，我们认为公园跑提供了一个“集体身体锻炼”的空间，参与者在其中既践行个人身体计划，同时又体验到“大家同舟共济”的感觉，这有助于减轻健康责任个体化的某些影响。其次，我们研究公园跑如何成为一种健康实践，塑造了“公园跑者”的主体身份。通过这样做，公园跑使新加入的活跃参与者能够协商身体风险话语，以调和作为“不适合跑步者”这一看似矛盾的体验。研究结果通过对健康实践与新兴身体文化（如公园跑）之间关系的新见解，为健康与疾病的社会学理解做出了贡献。
