Saving Children and Physical Education from Particulate Matter: The Politics of Air Pollution, Moving Bodies, and School Gyms in South Korea

Abstract

Since 2013, South Koreans have increasingly been concerned about particulate matter (PM) and its adverse impact on children’s health and safety. PM is a general term referring to a mixture of solid and liquid particles suspended in the air and is one of the major air pollutants. This growing concern led to cancellations of physical education classes in schools because children are considered vulnerable to PM and engaging in physical activities outdoors under a high level of PM is deemed risky. The government implemented various response strategies to keep students safe and healthy in schools. It developed and installed air quality technologies at schools, published PM guidelines, and promoted construction of gyms and indoor physical activities. Situating the issue of PM within the broader social, political, and economic contexts of South Korea, I explore how the issue of PM and its risk to children’s health has become a dominant public and state concern and how the government arrives at particular response strategies in physical education. Drawing on environmental justice literature, feminist studies on the relationship between humans and nature, and the concept of slow disaster, I analyze a range of sources related to the issue of PM and physical education, including government legislative and policy documents, research reports, news articles, comments from an online community organized around PM, and public statements from environmental groups. I show that the public’s panic around PM and children’s safety is culturally informed by their accumulated lived experiences of the government’s repeated failure to protect citizens from previous disasters. I show how the government’s policy of constructing gyms to contain clean air and healthy bodies fails to address the root cause of PM and is imbued with neoliberal and human exceptionalist logic. I also demonstrate how PM policies centered around gyms worsen regional disparity in education, health, and welfare, and environmental health inequities in South Korea. I argue the dominant idea that strengthening the material and conceptual boundaries between humans-nature, indoors-outdoors, safety-risk, and healthy-ill is not a fundamental and long-term solution to the PM problem. Instead, I argue that we must examine the complex inter-relations of all human and nature and challenge social structures that cause environmental degradation.