Household collectives: resituating health promotion and physical activity Julie Bønnelycke 1 , Catharina Thiel Sandholdt 2 and Astrid Pernille Jespersen 3 1 Steno Diabetes Center Copenhagen and Copenhagen Center for Health Research in the Humanities, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark 2 Experimentarium and Department of Science Education, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark 3 Copenhagen Center for Health Research in the Humanities, Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark Abstract In this article, we situate the practices of health and physical activity in household collectives, and conceptualise everyday health ‘behaviour’ and lifestyle as complex, collective practices. Based on an ethnographic study on everyday family life and health practices, we provide a framework for understanding the household as a collective, where the household collective may take precedence over individual preferences, and individual behaviour has collective implications. We describe the household as a node for practices, gathered by the activities that draw together and align actors in collective practices of everyday life. In the everyday efforts of the households to live up to ideals and balance conflicting practices, healthy living is about more than simple, individual choices about whether to follow health recommendations or not. It is also dependent on pragmatic negotiations, the distribution of roles and tasks and conflicts between ideals and what is feasible in the everyday management and maintaining of the household. We suggest that engaging with these collectives could serve as a useful point of departure for health promotion activities, situating health promotion in the here and now of collectives, tinkering with their specific constellations, values and identities in the entangledness of multiple household practices. Keywords: collective, ethnography, family, health promotion, household, practice theory Introduction: a practice-based, collective approach to health promotion In recent years, the most prevalent methods for public health communication and the preven- tion of non-communicable (‘lifestyle’) diseases on a policy level have focused on the individ- ual, and relied on motivation and information as foundations for change (Halkier et al. 2011, Hargreaves 2011, Lindsay 2010, Walls et al. 2011). Social scientists have criticised this approach for ultimately turning poor health into a matter of individual blame(Cohn 2014, Net- tleton and Green 2014, Henwood et al. 2011, Horrocks and Johnson 2014, Jespersen et al. 2013). Furthermore, the individual-focused approach neglects the social dynamics of the © 2018 Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA Sociology of Health & Illness Vol. xx No. xx 2018 ISSN 0141-9889, pp. 1–16 doi: 10.1111/1467-9566.12832