Call for Papers | “Reimagining Curriculum, Policy and Pedagogy in Health and Physical Education: Chinese Societies and Chinese Diasporas”, a Special Issue of Sport, Education and Society | Call ends January 31, 2024

Sport, Education and Society (SES) is a leading international journal dedicated to the advance of sociological understandings of the relationships between embodiment, policy, pedagogy, equity, and identity. This special edition seeks to bring together voices from social science and educational research, concerned with curriculum, policy, and pedagogy in Health and Physical Education (HPE) in Chinese societies and in the Chinese diasporas.

Critical scholars have been at the forefront of advancing the study of HPE to address sociocultural perspectives and diversity and inclusion issues related to the intersections of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. The field, however, is dominated by research that entails ways of embodied knowing and experiences in and about Europe, United Kingdom, North America, and Australia. This special issue encourages authors to turn the lens towards bridging empirical gaps and challenging theoretical absences in current scholarship in the context of Chinese societies and diasporas in HPE. This shift of academic landscape requires three distinct directions of scholarship that includes an extension of understandings in conceptual discourses and knowledge production, pedagogic, policy and curriculum approaches, and power relations and racial subjectivities of Chineseness and bodies in HPE.

The first aim of this special issue is to bring in conceptual discourses generated in Chinese contexts that opens up new spaces for theorising and critical thinking about HPE in languages beyond English. Such a shift reorientates thinking around Euro-American centric discourses in shaping western notions of bodily cultures predicated upon binary oppositions and scientific knowing. The second aim is to build and connect academic discussions on pedagogic, policy and curriculum approaches from Chinese HPE teachers local and abroad to elicit new experiences and fluid subjectivities and dialogues between the global and local and East and West. Chinese societies are often thought of as being homogenous without distinguishing their internal differences regarding localities (including China, Taiwan, Macau, Hong Kong) and migration processes (such as Chinese diaspora communities in Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom). This special issue aims to actively enable scholarly work that focuses on specific Chinese-speaking cities, and overseas Chinese communities that can contribute to a (re)imagining of what constitutes HPE practices in the 21^stcentury. The third aim calls for an exemplification of the diverse voices of Chinese teachers and students in everyday experiences in HPE. This area of work will raise consciousness of, and problematises, the power relations and the (re)production of racial subjectivities of Chineseness and bodies. This focus will provide a critical response to the contestable work of colonial legacies and cultural norming in HPE and highlight how Chinese students and teachers engage with the different orientations to movement and bodies, including its western and/or Chinese forms, negotiate their relationships to it and contribute to their (dis)engagement in HPE.

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