Health promotion as a complex assemblage: Science and technology studies as method

Abstract

In this chapter, we introduce some of the work that we have done during the last decade in the field of school-based health promotion. Drawing on the work John Law, and his connections to the broader field of studies of Science, Technology and Society (STS), we will engage with the limits and possibilities of reason, risk, rationality and aesthetics in health promotion interventions that target young people, and the forms of description, analysis and critique that are able to explore and make sense of these possibilities-and impossibilities. In particular, we discuss how Law's (After Method. Routledge, 2004) concept of 'method assemblage' provides a productive means to explore the shifting relationships between reason, risk, rationality and the embodied aesthetics of meaning-making that we think are important in understanding the limits and possibilities of school-based health promotion with young people. Our aim in this chapter is to ask questions about the more mainstream approaches to understanding the factors and strategies that promise to provide successful health promotion interventions in the school, and in other health promotion settings. The strategies and approaches that emerge from this analysis-including a sense of the always embodied dimensions of meaning-making, of the role of the 'audience' of young people in this meaning-making, and the limits and possibilities of mobilising morally charged emotions and storytelling (as 'tragic theatre')-offer innovative theoretical, methodological and empirical insights into the challenges of 'doing' and 'critiquing' health promotion with young people.