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Despite political change over the past 25 years in Britain there has been an unprecedented national policy focus on the social determinants of health and population-based approaches to prevent chronic disease. Yet, policy impacts have been modest, inequalities endure and behavioural approaches continue to shape strategies promoting healthy lifestyles. Critical public health scholarship has conceptualised this lack of progress as a problem of 'lifestyle drift' within policy whereby 'upstream' social contributors to health inequalities are reconfigured 'downstream' as a matter of individual behaviour change. While the lifestyle drift concept is now well established there has been little empirical investigation into the social processes through which it is realised as policies are (re)formulated and implementation is localised. Addressing this gap we present empirical findings from an ethnography conducted in a deprived English neighbourhood in order to explore: (i) the local context in the process of lifestyle drift and; (ii) the social relations that reproduce (in)equities in the design and delivery of lifestyle interventions. Analysis demonstrates how and why 'precarious partnerships' between local service providers were significant in the process of 'citizen shift' whereby government responsibility for addressing inequity was decollectivised.

The rationalities of advanced liberalism shape the call for people to be more responsible for 'being active and eating well' [Dean, M. (1999). Governmentality: Power and rule in modern society. London: Sage; Petersen, A., & Lupton, D. (1997). The new public health. London: Sage], even those living with social disadvantage. We draw upon qualitative data to examine how sport and recreation policy and program officers within state and local levels of government frame and interpret the 'active living imperative' for healthy lifestyles. Our analysis identified major policy tensions between different levels of government that directly affect the success of government initiatives to increase physical activity. We present our analysis of four main themes: (1) the rise of the health agenda in sport and recreation policy and sport and recreation services enhanced role in health promotion; (2) the obesity epidemic as the instigator for the policy shift in sport and recreation; (3) tensions between government agendas and competing priorities; and (4) governments' proposed solutions to support active leisure in communities. Our analysis of the sport/recreation sector revealed competing priorities with the health promotion focus on reducing lifestyle risk and a need for more strategic cooperation between levels of government and different departments.

This article explores how the global revival of roller derby as an alternative sport for women has been mobilised through online social networks, league promotion and fan sites that create imagined communities of 'roller grrrls'. In the creation of sport culture we argue that the virtual performance of 'derby' identities is as significant as the embodiment of play. Like other sports, derby sites mobilise affect (passion, pleasure, pain, desire to play) through a discourse of 'empowerment' that urges women to overcome limits and reinvent gendered subjectivity. However, within the virtual space of roller derby, complex affects are produced and circulated within power relations that can include or exclude. Through an analysis of the way affect is mobilised in selected roller derby sites, we identify how virtual sport identities are connected through the movement of 'affects' across bodies and leagues. These affects both circumscribe and undermine the notion of a single derby community.