2010 Events
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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