Constituting good health citizenship through British Columbia’s COVID-19 public updates

The COVID-19 pandemic has augmented discourses of individual citizen responsibility for collective health. This article explores how British Columbia, Canada’s widely praised COVID-19 communication participates in the development of neo-communitarian “active citizenship” governmentalities focused on the civic duty of voluntarily taking responsibility for the health of one’s community. We do so by investigating how public health updates from BC’s acclaimed Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry articulate this civic imperative through the rhetorical constitution of the “good covid citizen.” Our rhetorical analysis shows how this pro-social communication interpellates citizens within a discourse of behavioral, epistemic, and ethical responsibilisation. The communal ethos constituted through this public health communication significantly increases the burden of personal responsibility for health beyond norms of self-care. Making the protection of community health primarily the responsibility of individual citizens also presumes a privileged identity of empowered, active agency and implicitly excludes citizens who lack the means to successfully fulfill the expectations of good covid citizenship.

Food hygiene, public health education and citizenship in Britain, 1948–1967

This article examines food hygiene campaigns in Britain between 1948 and 1967, using these as a way to explore the making of health citizenship and the relationship between state and citizen. The projection of hygienic citizenship amalgamated old concerns around morality, modernity and cleanliness, as well as new issues surrounding the changing position of women, the home and the rise of consumerism. Other ways of thinking about citizenship, such as social citizenship and consumer citizenship, were incorporated within food hygiene campaigns. The success or otherwise of such efforts points to a complex re-working of the connections between public health and its publics.

Health Citizenship and Healthcare Access in Indonesia, 1945-2020

Health citizenship is understood over how the government provides access to healthcare. This paper aims to describe the development of health citizenship from the post-colonial until the democratization era in Indonesia by analyzing health accessibility. The social-history approach was applied to analyze contemporary study in Indonesian healthcare access from 1945 to 2020. This article analyses the dynamic over political regime changes context and its approach to deal with health accessibility based on acceptability, availability, and affordability issues. This study found that each political regime provides a different social-political context in prioritizing and administrating the accessibility of healthcare. Besides each regime appears issues of accessibility, all of which provoke inequity in healthcare. This paper argues that health citizenship development in Indonesia shows the underlying cause of inequity. Consequently, the minimal presence of public participation raises inequity. Inequity leads to healthcare access that provides pointless improvement. Narratives in health citizenship fulfillment call for public participation space in administering access to healthcare.

Development of Game-Based M-Learning Apps for Preschoolers

Recent studies indicate tablets as the preferred devices of preschool children, due to portability, autonomy of use and variety of apps. There is also extensive evidence of the contributions of digital technologies in different areas of learning at these ages. The Aprender XXI project aimed to develop game-based learning apps, with content recommended in the Curriculum Guidelines for Pre-School Education (CGPE). The project used Design-Based Research (DBR) methodology, which combines scientific research and technological development. It was divided into three phases: preliminary study (literature review, search for existing apps, study of preschool curriculum), development (specifications, scriptwriting, design and programing) and evaluation (tests with users and conclusions). The preliminary study identified the needs to define robust apps. The evaluation with children and educator validated the development and defined improvements in the apps. As a result, we obtained four thematic apps—environment, health, citizenship and professions, composed of a set of games, suitable for autonomous use for children or for educational activities guided by educators in kindergarten. In addition, a website collects children’s play data, which is represented with flowers in a virtual world, to illustrate their participation/collaboration for a better future.

The Body as a Site of Politics

The body, political theorists well know, has long served as a metaphor for the structure and relations of the polis. But embodiment is something that political theory has frequently bracketed when theorizing citizenship, agency, and the category of “the human.” Against this tendency, how might we reimagine the political potential of embodiment, or make space for considering “the virtues of vulnerability”? This chapter sets up the book as a whole, by raising and situating this question, and introducing readers to the key concepts grounding this inquiry: humility, autonomy, citizen-subjectivity, awakenings, medicalization, and neoliberalism. How does the problem of bodies get taken up within contemporary healthcare, where the consumer-patient gets hailed as an autonomous choice-maker, and what lessons can we learn about health, and health citizenship, from examining the tensions at work here?

Weighing on us all? Quantification and cultural responses to obesity in NHS Britain

How do cultures of self-quantification intersect with the modern state, particularly in relation to medical provision and health promotion? Here I explore the ways in which British practices and representations of body weight and weight management ignored or interacted with the National Health Service between 1948 and 2004. Through the lens of overweight, I examine health citizenship in the context of universal health provision funded from general taxation, and track attitudes toward “overweight” once its health implications and medical costs affected a public service as well as individual bodies and households. Looking at professional and popular discourses of overweight and obesity, I map the persistence of a highly individual culture of dietary and weight self-management in postwar Britain, and assess the degree to which it was challenged by a new measure of “obesity” – the body mass index – and by visions of an NHS burdened and even threatened by the increasing overweight of the citizens it was created to serve.