2011 Events
31 October 2011
'Food and Paid-Housewifery in Northern Italy'
Tiziana Traldi is an experienced researcher and a PhD candidate in the Anthropology of Material and Visual Culture at UCL. She will draw on her ethnographic fieldwork to illustrate four ways in which food is used as a medium to confirm, negotiate and challenge family roles and relationships.
25 May 2011
At Home in Contemporary Japan: Beyond the Minimal House
This special food study group event featured a guided tour by Dr Inge Daniels (Oxford University) of her exhibition at the Geffrye Museum in East London. Based on Inge’s ongoing ethnographic research, the tour focussed on photographs and objects relating to home life in contemporary Japan there was the opportunity to talk with Inge about her observations about food and eating.
6-8 April 2011
BSA Annual Conference: 60 Years of Sociology
London School of Economics, UK
1 March 2011
SCOFF seminar, Policy making within Scottish Food Culture
University of Stirling, UK
SCOFF (the Scottish Colloquium on Food & Feeding) in association with the Institute for Social Marketing & Centre for Tobacco Control Research, University of Stirling held a lunchtime seminar considering the challenges prevailing food culture imposes on policy making . It was an opportunity for anyone interested in the cultural components of food policy to come together to share their work & interest.
Presentations included:
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Dr Corinna Hawkes - “Exploring the culture of food policy: the case of Scotland”
Corinna will Reflect upon her work on the FEC project “Understanding food culture in Scotland and its comparison in an international context: implications for policy development”
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Dr Stephanie Chambers - “What do we think causes obesity, and what do we want to do about it?”
Stephanie will talk about a cross-sectional survey project which asked about beliefs in the causes of excess weight, and support for policy interventions. Recognition of the cultural complexity of the topic is central to more effective future policies.
Monday, 7 February 2011
Interviews, surveys and all that jazz: Research methods for exploring children’s food practices
University of Westminster, London
Researchers have noted that because food practices are embodied and embedded in social relations and social processes, they are not necessarily easily accessible to reflection. In their capacity to evoke the sensual, non-rational and material aspects of life, visual research methods offer potential for the study of food and eating. The flexible and interactive nature of some visual approaches also means that such methods may be particularly appropriate for research with children. Non-visual methods (e.g. interviews and focus groups) are also amenable to manipulation (e.g. using paired interviews and memory-work) to enable researchers to uncover the nuanced aspects of children’s everyday worlds. The fetishisation of methods and the lure of ‘innovation’ may, however, present their own challenges.
In this seminar we explored the utility and challenges associated with adopting a variety of visual and non-visual qualitative methods to study children’s food practices. Drawing on a range of literature relating to methods for making sense of everyday lives as well as examples from our own ongoing and completed research on family food practices, we provoked discussion about the appropriateness and challenges of using multiple methods in research with children and young people.
2010 Events
15 November 2010
Dr Tom MacMillan, Food Ethics Council
Tom will present findings from a study funded by NHS Health Scotland which aims at understanding food culture and its comparison in an international context (including the implications for policy development). He will talk about the approach the team took, which included a review of literature about the factors influencing eating practices and an assessment of the extent to which the cultural dimensions of food and health have been considered in recent Scottish policy.
5-6 July 2010
2nd BSA Food Study Group Conference
The British Library Conference Centre, London, UK
Abstract
Following the success of 2009's event, the aim of this 2nd conference is to further explore the interface between food, society and public health through a sociological lens. Understanding patterns of food consumption, food acquirement or food production offers wider insights into social class, ethnicity, self-identity and the life course and the implications for national and global inequalities.
Food systems and eating practices are changing in response to the worldwide economic downturn and ever present environmental concerns, including climate change. This raises many questions, including: How are people responding? Is there a return to a ‘make do and mend’ mentality in relation to food? Are families passing on food skills and knowledge in a bid to ‘pull together’ and cope with change? Are food systems and eating practices becoming more sustainable?
What about food production and consumption in less developed countries? We are keen to explore how changing food systems are impacting on food security and livelihoods in developed and less developed countries. Is innovative action being taken to maximise the use of locally grown food, both in terms of improving sustainability and with regard to the taste/enjoyment of food?
This leaves us with the further question of whether current policies and interventions to improve diet and reduce levels of obesity remain pertinent, or do we need new solutions in a changed and changing world?
15 February 2010
Living with risk in the age of ‘intensive motherhood’: maternal identity and infant feeding
Ellie Lee, University of Kent
Abstract
Socio-cultural studies have suggested that, even in societies where it is a commonplace practice, infant feeding with formula milk can compromise women’s identity as ‘good mothers’. This proposition is explored in this paper. We first provide a brief review of literature that has considered the broad socio-cultural context for infant feeding, that of ‘intensive motherhood’. Attention is drawn to the idea that this context is one in which feeding babies formula milk is constructed as risky, for physical health but also for the mother-child relationship. Drawing on data from a study of mothers living in Great Britain, the paper then explores how mothers actually experience infant feeding with formula milk; how they live with a context that deems their actions risky. Maternal experience is found to include variously moral collapse, feelings of confidence, expressions of defiance and defensiveness, and opting to go it alone in response to ‘information overload’. Despite these variations in how mothers live with risk, the conclusion is drawn that the current cultural context does appear to be one overall in which mothers who formula feed often have to struggle hard to maintain a positive sense of themselves as mothers.
2009 Events
14 December 2009 - Food and its meaning for asylum seeking children and young people in foster care
Ravi Kohli, Helen Connelly (University of Bedfordshire) and Andrea Warman (British Association for Adoption and Fostering)
Abstract
There is little in the existing literature in refugee studies, foster care and the anthropology of food about the ways refugee and asylum seeking children regard food. This presentation reports on two projects that seek to understand how these children and their carers talk about their relationships with food after seeking sanctuary within the UK. The first is a study examining asylum seeking children’s perception of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, where they talk about food, survival, and well being as they look for asylum. The second is a project with foster carers who give accounts of the meaning of food within their households, and the strategies they use to ensure that children feel understood through food that is on offer to them. The findings suggest that food is an important marker for feelings of safety and being at ‘home’ in a new land.
11 May 2009
Gwen E Chapman, Associate Professor, Food, Nutrition & Health Program, University of British Columbia, Vancouver: Food choice processes in Canadian families: Culture, routine and reflexivity
Dr. Chapman recently completed a three year qualitative study of food choice processes in Canadian families from three ethnocultural groups in two regions of Canada: Punjabi British Columbians (PBC), African Nova Scotians (ANS), and European Canadians living in British Columbia (EBC) and Nova Scotia (ENS). In this presentation, she discussed the ways in which tradition, commonsense and reflexivity underpin participants’ everyday food practices. Despite very different histories of migration, adults in both the Punjabi British Columbian and African Nova Scotian groups tended to invoke notions of tradition and common sense understandings of well-being when explaining their food choices. In contrast, participants from the EBC group often articulated explicit discourses relating to nutritional science and/or a politics of consumption, demonstrating a high degree of reflexivity. Participants in the ENS group, despite having a similar ethnocultural background to EBC participants, displayed less engagement with these discourses. In contrast, traditional notions of ‘eating well’ appeared more prominent. These findings raise questions about the interrelated roles of culture and place in shaping food choice processes.
9 March 2009 - Jakob Klein, Lecturer in Social Anthropology, SOAS: In search of ‘quality’: food strategies in urban Southwest China
This paper discussed the attempts of households in contemporary urban Kunming, Southwest China to define and acquire ‘good quality’ foods. The discussion was set against the backdrop of an increase in the use of agrochemicals in food production, food safety scares, rising food prices, and the emergence of a Chinese market in ‘organic’, ‘green’ and other similar foodstuffs.
2008 Events
12 December 2008 - Ed Harris, University of Edinburgh, 'Exploring localism in alternative food networks: eating locally and eating well in Fife, Scotland'
19 September 2008 - Laura Nisbet, University of Edinburgh 'Retail provision and accessing healthy food in remote Scottish island communities'.
15 September 2008: Rebecca O’Connell presented on: The Negotiation of 'Kincorporation': the social relations of childminding viewed through food. Childminding is popularly characterised as childcare in a home- or family-like environment. Part of Rebecca's doctoral research focussed on mealtimes as a vehicle for exploring the social relations which familial ideology at once suggests and obscures. In this presentation she described the conditions which led her to adopt this approach and the data generated by it. Particularly illuminating, was the intersection of class and ethnic practices with the reproduction of family-like relations in these empirical contexts.
14-15 July 2008
BSA Food Study Group Conference: Food, Society and Public Health
The British Library Conference Centre, London
Confirmed keynote speakers: Claude Fischler, EHSS and CNRS, Paris and Allison James, University of Sheffield.
See Allison James' Plenary Slideshow from the Food Study Group Conference.
9 June: Facilitated debate based on Guthman and DuPuis’s 2006 paper from Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24(3) 427 – 448 Embodying neoliberalism: economy, culture, and the politics of fat.
Friday, 30 May 2008 at 12-2pm, the Usher Room at the University of Edinburgh, Public Health Sciences, Teviot Place. Andrea Tonner from the University of Strathclyde presented a short paper on ‘cookbook choices: a matter of self identity’. This was followed by discussion and a general round-up of members' research activities.
2007 Events
3 December - Family Food and Convenience Consumption
Marylyn Carrigan, University of Birmingham
24 September - Domestic Kitchen Practices: Routines, Risks and Reflexivity
Lydia Martens, University of Keele
4 June 2007 - The Impacts of Nutrigenomics on Public Health
Rachel Dechenne
3 May 2007
Size Acceptance, Dieting and Gender
A half-day seminar supported by Coventry University's Applied Research Centre in Health & Lifestyle Interventions
Programme:
12.00–1.00pm: Registration/ Lunch/ Welcome
1.00–2.00pm: Men, Dieting and the War on Obesity: Understandings from a Sociological Study, Dr Lee Monaghan, University of Limerick
2.00–2.30pm: tea/coffee
2.30-3.30pm: Male partners and their response to female desire to lose weight, Prof. Julia Buckroyd, University of Hertfordshire
3.30–4.00pm: General discussion
13 April 2007
BSA Conference - Social Connections: Identities, Technologies, Relationships - Food Study Group Stream
University of East London, Docklands Campus, London
Programme:
0900-0930 Study Group 'Meet & Greet'
0930-1100 Food Study Group Generations and Kinship session Chair - Wendy Wills
1130-1300 Food Study Group Mundane Cultures Session: Chair - Libby Bishop
1300-1330 Food Study Group AGM.
1530-1700 Food Study Group Beliefs and Disenchantment session:Chair - TBC
1730-1830 Food Study Group Keynote Lecture: 'Youth Cultures of Eating: Intimacy, Youth and Friendship' - Prof. Elspeth Probyn, Professor of Gender & Cultural Studies, The University of Sydney. Abstract available here.
26 February 2007 - Bread: Health and Production Aspects
Dr Bogdan Dobraszczyk, The University of Reading
26 January 2007
Obesity and Extremes: What's the problem?
University of Edinburgh
Speakers: Karen Throsby, University of Warwick - "Dieting like a Normal Person": Obesity, Risk and Responsibility in Accounts of Weight Loss Surgery.
Lucy Aphramor, Coventry University and 'HELP' (Cardiac Rehabilitation Programme) - Has the Energy Balance Equation had its day? Remapping Fatness with Society in Mind.
2006 Events
British Sociological Association Annual Conference 2006
Food Study Group (SCOFF) Stream
Abstracts of the 9 papers from Harrogate are available here
Photographs from the study group's drink reception and 'meet the author' session are available by Clicking here (Powerpoint format).
London seminar and lunch series 2006 - University of Westminster.
February 2006 - Liz Dowler spoke about the work of the Food Ethics council. You can find out more about the FEC here: http://www.foodethicscouncil.org/
Monday, 22nd May: Dr Jane Whittle, History Dept, University of Exeter. 'The consumption of food in an early seventeenth century household' - Short report available here.
Monday, 11th September: - Food Poverty - Acting Local, Thinking National
Chaired by Lisa Wilson from Sustain's Food Poverty Project.
Monday, 18th December - Insitute of Education in conjunction with the Auto/Biography Study Group conference on 'Food and Lives'.
2005 Events
11th October 2005: Learning to cook - straightforward, necessary or really worth the effort? Speaker: Dr Frances Short. University of Westminster, London.
30th June 2005: The Benefit of Experience? Food and easting in later life, University of Edinburgh
22nd March 2005: 'Food, eating and the lifecourse'
Food Study Group stream at the BSA Annual Conference, University of York.
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