Mens Sana in Corpore Sano: Debating Female Sport in Argentina: 1900–46

This paper examines the intellectual debates generated by the growth of female sporting practices that occurred in Argentina between 1900 and 1946. In encouraging sporting activities as a key to perfecting the body and improving the mind, different medical, sporting, and physical education experts articulated a strongly gendered discourse. Controlled and rational sports were promoted as eugenic practices that enhanced women's childbearing capacity and improved their mothering abilities. By examining the opinions of experts about the impact of sport on the different stages in the female life cycle, this paper evaluates acceptable and objectionable physical practices and shows how these were related to social constructions of gender. As sporting practices became increasingly popular in the 1930s and 1940s, the difficulties in controlling them became more apparent, leading to concerns about their relationship to the declining birth rate, the apparent moral decline of the population, and the changes in social customs. As experts debated the implications of these changes, a new understanding of womanhood began to emerge.     

‘It’s not fair’: policy discourses and students’ understandings of plagiarism in a New Zealand university

Plagiarism is a concept that is difficult to define. Although most higher education institutions have policies aimed at minimising and addressing student plagiarism, little research has examined the ways in which plagiarism is discursively constructed in university policy documents, or the connections and disconnections between institutional and student understandings of plagiarism in higher education. This article reports on a study that explored students’ understandings of plagiarism in relation to institutional plagiarism discourses at a New Zealand university. The qualitative study involved interviews with 21 undergraduate students, and analysis of University plagiarism policy documents. The University policy documents revealed moral and regulatory discourses. In the interviews, students predominantly drew on ethico-legal discourses, which reflected the discourses in the policy documents. However, the students also drew on (un)fairness discourses, confusion discourses, and, to a lesser extent, learning discourses. Notably, learning discourses were absent in the University policy. Our findings revealed tensions between the ways plagiarism was framed in institutional policy documents, and students’ understandings of plagiarism and academic writing. We suggest that, in order to support students’ acquisition of academic writing skills, plagiarism should be framed in relation to ‘learning to write’, rather than as a moral issue.