Adolescents’ Perspectives on Personal and Societal Responsibility for Childhood Obesity — The Study of Beliefs through ‘Serious’ Game (PlayDecide)

The dominant approaches to public health policy on childhood obesity are based on the neoliberal emphasis of personal choice and individual responsibility. We study adolescents’ (N = 81) beliefs about responsibility for childhood obesity as a public health issue, through an innovative participatory method, PlayDecide, organised in two countries: the UK and Spain. There is no evidence of a blanket rejection of individual responsibility, rather, a call for renegotiation of the values that inform adolescents’ food choices. The findings suggest the need to broaden the framing of obesity‐related policy to go beyond the nutritional paradigm and include other values that signal health.     

Actors,others, simulacra: a Deleuzean minority report on the early modern Dubrovnik stage

ABSTRACT

A playwright in the minor and marginal culture of renaissance Ragusa, Marin Dr?i? (1508–1557) has often been compared to Shakespeare, despite the obvious impossibility of influence in either direction. There is however an aspect of Dr?i?’s legacy which has received a scarce critical interest in Croatia, although it could also be discussed along the lines of Shakespeare studies: early modern Dubrovnik acting practice, culture, and style. Dr?i?’s actual and meta-theatrical treatment of acting will here be interpreted through the lenses of Gilles Deleuze’s essay ‘One less manifesto’. In this essay, Deleuze expands his notion of ‘the minor’, arguing for a kind of acting practice that would rely on variation, movement, becoming, and a perpetual linguistic deformation, forces that hinder absorption into the discourse of ‘the major’. I will further suggest that Marin Dr?i?’s exposure of the anti-theatrical prejudice of his contemporaries – clothed in a mock-version of Genesis and elaborated in the prologue of his comedy Uncle Maroje – could be read as an exemplary inversion of Plato’s method of argumentation that makes a Deleuzian case for the actor as the ultimate, troubling Other, the simulacrum of true being, a promiscuous and metamorphic kin of marionettes, animals, and women.