Moving our bodies - Moving for mental health Michael Cole, School of Public Health, Imperial College London, and The Society of Sports Therapists (Orcid ID: 0000-0002-4131-9566) In celebration of Mental Health Awareness Week (13 th to 19 th May), and the Mental Health Foundation’s theme of ‘Moving my body - Moving for my mental health’, here’s a short blog post that’s part personal and part political. Movement is my primary love language. For me, simply changing my body position whilst sitting in my office chair is self-care. Engaging in exercise is one of the best presents I gift to my body and to my mental health almost every day. But there are tensions within exercise. In this blog piece I take a brief look at two of these. Tension 1: Exercise is great, but it’s personal – why aren’t you moving more? On the one hand, we know that the health benefits of exercise benefit everybody; on the other hand, an individual’s relationship with the act of exercising is hi
For educators reflecting on their identity, position(ality) and responsibility in society, it is useful to actively critique the ways in which we may inadvertently reproduce patterns of inequitable power in our social relations. For almost half a century, white supremacy has taught us to view marginalised, indigenous and racially-minoritised peoples and practices through a lens that judges them as either one or more of: - misplaced (or out of place, see non-gender binary public toilets, accessibility for disabled communities, or surveillance of Black and brown customers and students) - lesser (e.g. hip-hop vs classical music, or living as a traveller vs in a house) - invisible (or hyper-visible depending on context, see 'Stop and Search' vs recruitment) - threatening (e.g. whiteness wants to maintain the colour line, protect its power and privileges, its 'genes', its 'virtuous' psyche of 'goodness') - deviant (whiteness is often a mirror that reflects