The ‘weight’ of stories for disrupting body discourses among PE and sport science university students

This paper explores how dominant obesity and health discourses shape preservice physical education (PE) and sport science university students’ understandings of fatness, health and their future professional roles. Little is known about how preservice PE and sport science students negotiate such discourses and project them into their professional future. The study employed a narrative pedagogical activity based on an autoethnographic story addressing fat stigma in PE and sport. Participants included 102 undergraduate students in Physical Activity and Sport Sciences and Primary PE Teacher Education programmes from a Spanish university. Their written reflections and small-group and whole-class discussions were the primary data sources. Drawing on Foucauldian theory, a poststructuralist critical discourse analysis was carried out to identify how dominant and counter-discourses on health, fatness and PE were reproduced, resisted or reinterpreted. Findings reveal a complex coexistence of discourses in students’ narratives. Risk understandings frame fatness as a personal problem requiring self-discipline, lifestyle regulation and body correction. At the same time, critical and pluralistic perspectives emerge that recognise fat stigma, question performance-oriented PE practices and advocate for more inclusive pedagogies. However, dominant moral imperatives persist, linking health to individual responsibility and normative body ideals. This ambivalence was evident in students’ projections of their future professional roles, oscillating between aspirations for inclusion and the reproduction of pathologising assumptions about fat bodies.