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The manoeuvring of everyday spaces to nudge the population towards a physically active lifestyle or active living has been the hallmark of the policy modes of instrumental thinking for combating physical inactivity, particularly in urban spaces across the world. Thus, the active promotion of fitness activities by the postcolonial state signifies the centrality of the body in disciplining docile and inactive individuals to produce fit and active citizens. Such a population-based approach has often raised concerns about social and spatial justice and expressions of identity, liberty, and surveillance, even as everyday spaces in cities continue to exhibit elements of colonial governmentality. In the midst of this, the body continues to be central to the ways in which such a population makes sense of being physically active and ‘being healthy’ in their everyday lives. By employing a multi-sited ethnography conducted over a period of 10 months in different public parks in Delhi, the present chapter aims to understand the ways in which fitness activities are performed, produced, and practised in the city. While public parks themselves are a product of colonial urban governmentalities in Delhi, this chapter argues that active bodies engaged in everyday sports in the parks also emerge as the critical site for the bodily inscription of global standards of physical activity. Driven by Western fitness regimes, individuals tend to understand themselves as entrepreneurial selves that can bring to life this imagination of the body ideal even while being engaged in various fitness and leisure activities aimed at being ‘healthy’.

Drawing primarily on the Japanese context, this study aims to highlight this setting to emphasise the potential for tertiary-level self-access language centres to develop lifelong global citizenship, self-reflection and cross-cultural collaboration.

This inquiry calls on the community of practice approach to account for the shared interests motivating lifelong cross-cultural participation, the quality of social engagement between actors, and the material and cognitive tools called upon to realise global citizenship’s shared enterprise.

As argued here, embracing various cultures and inclusive participation can lead to a broader understanding of global citizenship, avoiding narrow-minded views of globalism through shared knowledge and critical practices. Further, self-access provides a cost-effective, technology-mediated alternative to bilateral student mobility, whereby digital community-building occasions cross-cultural practice that may be extended throughout a learner’s life, irrespective of their financial status or place of study.

This study is one of a select few drawing on the community of practice framework within the context of lifelong global citizenship. Nevertheless, such an approach remains primed for future development. With a social constructivist philosophy in view, the authors suggest complementary qualitative research approaches that highlight the socially situated nature of both disciplines.

In the past 10 years, the scale of running events in China has increased dramatically, and the forms of running events have also become rich and diverse. Running is not only a social phenomenon but also a historical and cultural phenomenon as an organic part of human culture with its own sociological values in China. This chapter offers insight into the development of Chinese running culture and how this has emerged from ancient and modern Chinese running cultures based on Foucault's disciplinary power theory, biopower and the technologies of the self. This chapter argues that running culture in China constructs the subjectivity of the Chinese runners under the joint action of the technologies of power and the technologies of the self. The findings acknowledge how Chinese Runners present and express themselves by showing a ‘sense of presence’. Runners illustrate the implicit or explicit meaning and value of a particular way of life through running. Runners regard running as the technology of the self for self-expression and self-creation so that individuals can control their bodies and soul, thoughts, behaviours and ways of existence. Emerging technologies of power provide possibilities for the production of running culture in China, and the current policy under the technologies of power meets the needs of runners. In Chinese running culture, power was not oppressive but productive.