ORCID Profile
0000-0001-8766-1087
Current Organisation
University of Adelaide
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Publisher: Wiley
Date: 30-08-2007
DOI: 10.1111/J.1467-9566.2007.01029.X
Abstract: Despite the intense level of attention directed towards obesity, there has been limited success in addressing the rising rates of this public health phenomenon. This paper argues that current approaches to obesity fail to consider concepts of embodiment, and in particular, that gendered and class-based experiences of embodiment are ignored in health promotion practices and policies. Drawing on Bourdieu's concept of habitus, this ethnographic study sought to locate obesity within the biographies and everyday experiences of two groups of women from differing socio-economic settings. Rather than identify with the clinical category of obesity, these women constructed identities that were refracted through a gendered and classed habitus, and in particular, through their role as mothers. Food provision and practices were central to constructs of mothering, and these relational identities were at odds with the promotion of in idual behavioural changes. Moreover, these women's daily lives were shaped by different class-based aspects of habitus, such as employment. In demonstrating the ways in which obesity is enmeshed in participants' taken-for-granted, everyday practices, we problematise the universality of health-promotion messages and highlight the integral role that the critical theory of habitus has in understanding the embodiment of obesity.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 15-11-2018
DOI: 10.1111/AMAN.13141
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 12-2011
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 04-2006
DOI: 10.1080/13648470500516147
Abstract: Anthropological concepts of relatedness have not been addressed in any of the writings on anorexia, despite the literature being replete with negative connotations of sociality such as withdrawal, regression, and toxic families (in the form of 'obsessive mothers' or 'absent fathers'). As a departure to the vast literature on this topic, this multi-sited ethnographic project draws on the recent critiques and broadening of the concept of kinship to examine the ways in which a group of people with a diagnosis of anorexia understood and experienced relatedness in their everyday lives, that is, how they continually transformed connections by truncating, creating, sustaining and abandoning them. Those practices that are taken for granted as creating and sustaining relatedness-from the everyday practices of commensality to the capacity to have children-were consistently negated. Negating consensual avenues of relatedness did not leave these people in a void. On the contrary, new and productive meanings and experiences of being related were created and people entered into a relationship with anorexia that, in turn, tempered their relationships with their everyday worlds. In examining the 'relational matrix' of anorexia, new spaces of agency, ambiguity and power are illuminated.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-2005
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 20-09-2017
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 15-08-2017
DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2016.1209752
Abstract: What are the symbolic meanings of breakfast in the context of one of Australia's largest childhood obesity intervention programs? Utilizing a range of theoretical insights into the morality of food and eating and the anthropology of food, we trace how breakfast is packaged and promoted to families in an Australian community as a 'healthy start' to the day. Through ethnographic and historic investigation, we argue that eating breakfast and certain types of breakfast foods are symbolic of a classed, healthy lifestyle pattern, embodying parental knowledge and bodily regulation to routinely structure daily life. In communities where poverty and unemployment are harsh realities, well-intentioned programs that encourage people to eat a healthy breakfast are encoded with an assemblage of moral values-of knowledge, foods, families, and times and spaces-that are often difficult to reconcile with the wider sociocultural context in which many people live.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-07-2018
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 08-2008
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 04-2016
DOI: 10.1016/J.SOCSCIMED.2016.02.028
Abstract: The potential for regulatory measures to address escalating rates of obesity is widely acknowledged in public health circles. Many advocates support regulations for their potential to reduce health inequalities, in light of the well-documented social gradient in obesity. This paper examines how different social groups understand the role of regulations and other public health interventions in addressing obesity. Drawing upon focus group data from a metropolitan city in southern Australia, we argue that implementing obesity regulations without attention to the ways in which disadvantaged communities problematise obesity may lead to further stigmatisation of this key target population. Tuana's work on the politics of ignorance, and broader literature on classed asymmetries of power, provides a theoretical framework to demonstrate how middle class understandings of obesity align with dominant 'obesity epidemic' discourses. These position obese people as lacking knowledge underpinning support for food labelling and mandatory nutrition education for welfare recipients as well as food taxes. In contrast, disadvantaged groups emphasised the potential for a different set of interventions to improve material circumstances that constrain their ability to act upon existing health promotion messages, while also describing priorities of everyday living that are not oriented to improving health status. Findings demonstrate how ignorance is produced as an explanation for obesity, widely replicated in political settings and mainstream public health agendas. This politics of ignorance and its logical reparation serve to reproduce power relations in which particular groups are constructed as lacking capacity to act on knowledge, whilst maintaining others in privileged positions of knowing.
Publisher: Clinical Biotec
Date: 15-02-2020
Abstract: The Lancet Commissions are widely known as aspirational pieces, providing the mechanisms for consortia and networks of researchers to organize, collate, interrogate and publish around a range of subjects. Although the Commissions are predominantly led by biomedical scientists and cognate public health professionals, many address social science questions and involve social science expertise. Medical anthropologist David Napier was lead author of the Lancet Commission on Culture and Health (2014), for ex le, and all commissions on global health (lobal-health/commissions) address questions of social structure, everyday life, the social determinants of health, and global inequalities.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 26-11-2017
DOI: 10.1111/TAJA.12260
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 05-08-2018
DOI: 10.1002/HPJA.185
Abstract: Australian policymakers have acknowledged that implementing obesity prevention regulations is likely to be facilitated or hindered by public opinion. Accordingly, we investigated public views about possible regulations. Cross-sectional survey of 2732 persons, designed to be representative of South Australians aged 15 years and over. Questions examined views about four obesity prevention regulations (mandatory front-of-pack nutrition labelling for packaged foods zoning restrictions to prohibit fast food outlets near schools taxes on unhealthy high fat foods and taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages). Levels of support (Likert scale) for each intervention and reasons for support/opposition were ascertained. Views about the regulations were mixed: support was highest for mandatory nutrition labelling (90%) and lowest for taxes (40%-42%). High levels of support for labelling were generally underpinned by a belief that this regulation would educate "Other" people about nutrition. Lower levels of support for zoning restrictions and taxes were associated with concerns about government overreach and the questionable effectiveness of these regulations in changing behaviours. Levels of support for each regulation, and reasons for support or opposition, differed by gender and socio-economic status. Socio-demographic differences in support appeared to reflect gendered responsibilities for food provision and concerns about the material constraints of socio-economic deprivation. Engagement with target populations may offer insights to optimise the acceptability of regulations and minimise unintended social consequences. SO WHAT?: Resistance to regulations amongst socio-economically disadvantaged target populations warrants attention from public health advocates. Failure to accommodate concerns identified may further marginalise these groups.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 14-03-2008
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 2016
Abstract: The evaluation of complex systems-wide public health interventions requires evaluation research that is underpinned by theory. This article presents and discusses the trans-disciplinary evaluation research framework developed to support the evaluation of a South Australian program called OPAL (Obesity Prevention and Lifestyle). The aim is to provide insights into the research design, methods and implementation of the evaluation and contribute to the debate on how to evaluate community-based interventions with complicated and complex aspects. In an attempt to capture the complexity of childhood obesity and the intervention, the OPAL evaluation research employs post positivist, interpretive and critical epistemologies, valuing epistemological pluralism. Each component of the multi-phase mixed methods evaluation captures different yet complementary information concerning the context, process, cost effectiveness and outcomes providing a more complete understanding of the impacts of the complex program. Evaluation research is not without challenges. Some of the tensions and challenges that arose in the establishment, planning and conduct of the OPAL program and evaluation are discussed.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 30-10-2014
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 21-07-2014
Abstract: This article explores a theoretical legacy that underpins the ways in which many social scientists come to know and understand obesity. In attempting to distance itself from essentialist discourses, it is not surprising that this literature focuses on the discursive construction of fat bodies rather than the materiality or agency of bodily matter. Ironically, in developing arguments that only critique representations of obesity or fat bodies, social science scholars have maintained and reproduced a central dichotomy of Cartesian thinking – that between social construction and biology. In this article I examine the limitations of social constructionist arguments in obesity/critical fat studies and the implications for ignoring materiality. Through bringing together the theoretical insights of material feminism and obesity science’s attention to maternal nutrition and the fetal origins hypothesis, this article moves beyond the current philosophical impasse, and repositions biological and social constructionist approaches to obesity not as mutually exclusive, but as one of constant interplay and connectedness.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 08-2015
DOI: 10.1016/J.SOCSCIMED.2015.06.030
Abstract: This paper examines how contemporary understandings of 'health' and 'care' are engaged with and practiced by women with disordered eating. Based on findings from an Australian study investigating why people with disordered eating are reluctant to engage with treatment services (March 2012 to March 2015), we demonstrate how young women use elements of a 'health habitus' and 'care' to rationalise and justify their practices. Moving beyond Foucauldian theories of self-discipline and in idual responsibility we argue that Bourdieu's concept of habitus and ethnographic concepts of care provide a deeper understanding of the ways in which people with disordered eating embody health practices as a form of care and distinction. We demonstrate how eating and bodily practices that entail 'natural', medical and ethical concerns (in particular, the new food regime known as orthorexia) are successfully incorporated into participants' eating disorder repertoires and embodied as a logic of care. Understanding how categories of health and care are tinkered with and practiced by people with disordered eating has important implications for health professionals, family members and peers engaging with and identifying people at all stages of help-seeking.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 05-2010
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 04-2004
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 03-2003
Abstract: This paper draws on ethnographic material to challenge the taken-for-granted relationship between anorexia and fear of fat. While popular understandings assume anorexia to be an extension of everyday dietary guidelines and a fear of weight gain from foods high in fats and calories, I argue that it is fear of contamination rather than fear of fat per se that is at issue. Through a critique and extension of Mary Douglas' structuralist typology and Julia Kristeva's embodied theory of abjection, I demonstrate that it is the qualities of certain foods, and in particular their amorphous natures, that render them contaminating. Saturating fats and invisible calories are considered dangerous by people with anorexia because they have the ability to move, seep, and infiltrate the body through the interplay of senses. Foods that transgress conceptual and bodily boundaries are thus to be avoided at all costs, for they have the potential to defile and pollute. In light of the low recovery rates for those with anorexia within Australia (and internationally), the findings of this paper have significant implications for the understanding and treatment of this disorder.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 08-07-2016
Abstract: Bourdieu suggested that the habitus contains the ‘genetic information’ which both allows and disposes successive generations to reproduce the world they inherit from their parents’ generation. While his writings on habitus are concerned with embodied dispositions, biological processes are not a feature of the practical reason of habitus. Recent critiques of the separate worlds of biology and culture, and the rise in epigenetics, provide new opportunities for expanding theoretical concepts like habitus. Using obesity science as a case study we attempt to conceptualise the enfolding of biological and social processes (via a Deleuzian metaphor) to develop a concept of biohabitus – reconfiguring how social and biological environments interact across the life course, and may be transmitted and transformed intergenerationally. In conclusion we suggest that the enfolding and reproduction of social life that Bourdieu articulated as habitus is a useful theoretical frame that can be enhanced to critically develop epigenetic understandings of obesity, and vice versa.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 09-03-2017
DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2018.1423563
Abstract: By foregrounding positive and productive capacities of fat, we explore experiences of expanding, maintaining, or diminishing body sizes to accommodate the different meanings and enactments of fat. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in a South Australian community that has experienced significant socioeconomic disadvantage, we detail how the "problem" of fat in public health discourse is countered in the lived experience of people targeted for obesity intervention. In so doing, we attend to the multiple meanings and practices of fat that differ to the focus within public health interventions on the negative health consequences of overweight and obesity.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 07-2014
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 22-06-2011
DOI: 10.3109/03014460.2011.591829
Abstract: This paper traces the genealogy of the Barker hypothesis and its intersections with popular representations of scientific discourses about pregnancy and maternal obesity. Drawing on Foucault's genealogical method, this study examines the historical 'descent' of the developmental origins of adult disease and its initial grounding in structural factors of gender inequality and low socioeconomic status. In the more recent reproductive medicine literature, Barker's hypothesis has been used to understand the causes and consequences of foetal over-nutrition and has shifted its focus from social determinants to in idual, gendered bodies. The print media has gainfully employed this conceptualization of obesity and, in doing so, placed women, and mothers in particular, as causal agents in the reproduction of obesity across generations. Such a 'common sense' understanding of obesity production and reproduction means that both the scientific literature and the public understanding of science has inadvertently assisted in putting women forward as the transmitters of obesity across generations. This powerful telescoping of the origins of obesity to women's bodies and their appetites is in stark contrast to earlier foci on gender inequalities and changing women's circumstances.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 23-11-2010
Abstract: This paper investigates the ways in which ‘the child’ is positioned in obesity debates and, in doing so, examines the discursive relations between childhood obesity, mothering and child neglect. Using legal cases of parental neglect and an analysis of representations of obesity in Australian print media, we argue that a particular constellation of ‘child politics’ in which children are represented as innocent victims of poor parenting is at play. Parenting, however, is a code for mothers and it is their gendered responsibility for food and families for which they are now being held legally culpable in cases of neglect. The relationship between children and mothers has become the focus of moral discourses around childhood obesity, containing contradictory elements of innocence and risk, responsibility and danger. The intersection of child politics, mothering and in idualized responsibility not only illuminates the ways in which gender is absent yet centrally implicated in obesity debates and policy, but also highlights how models of neoliberal governance encompass both State and decentralized forms of power in their attempt to regulate excess bodies.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 12-2007
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 06-2008
DOI: 10.1016/J.HEALTHPLACE.2007.06.008
Abstract: Since their establishment in 1992, Australian Immigration Detention Centres have been the focus of increasing concern due to allegations of their serious impact on the mental health of asylum seekers. Informed by Foucault's treatise on surveillance and the phenomenological work of Casey, this paper extends the current clinical data by examining the architecture and location of detention centres, and the complex relationships between space, place and mental health. In spatialising these relationships, we argue that Immigration Detention Centres operate not only as Panopticons, but are embodied by asylum seekers as 'anti-places': as places that mediate and constitute thinned out and liminal experiences. In particular, it is the embodied effects of surveillance and suspended liminality that impact on mental health. An approach which locates the embodiment of place and space as central to the poor mental health of asylum seekers adds an important dimension to our understandings of (dis)placement and mental health in the lives of the exiled.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 16-09-2016
Abstract: With the rise of ‘globesity’, fat activism and Fat Studies have become political players in countering negative stereotypes and the devaluation of fat bodies. Both groups are erse, yet share a common goal to celebrate and/or accept fatness, and challenge practices and discourses that reinforce ‘normal’ bodies (such as diets, ‘fat talk’ and medicalisation). In this article, we reflect on our engagement with a Fat Studies conference, and critically interrogate the assumptions that underlie this particular space. It is not surprising that fat activists and Fat Studies scholars bring different ideologies to the table, yet the differences between them have not been adequately scrutinised or theorised. Drawing upon Linda Alcoff’s feminist philosophy, we examine how identity politics and intersectional perspectives are both used in fat activism, yet have the effect of creating unresolved tensions between singular and multiple embodied identities. We argue that an identity politics approach (exemplified through embodied visibility and declarations of ‘thin privilege’) has the potential to create boundaries for policing and exclusion, and is thus at odds with the much broader axes identified by intersectorial approaches. Rather than dismiss the power of identity politics, we argue for a careful reframing of the relationship between identity politics and intersectionality in fat activism and Fat Studies. We suggest that unexamined contradictions that arise from this mismatch may be counterproductive to the important subversive aims of the movement.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 10-2009
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 13-11-2016
Abstract: Intense concern about obesity in the public imagination and in political, academic and media discourses has catalysed advocacy efforts to implement regulatory measures to reduce the occurrence of obesity in Australia and elsewhere. This article explores public attitudes towards the possible implementation of regulations to address obesity by analysing emotions within popular discourses. Drawing on reader comments attached to obesity-relevant news articles published on Australian news and current affairs websites, we examine how popular anxieties about the 'obesity crisis' and vitriol directed at obese in iduals circulate alongside understandings of the appropriate role of government to legitimise regulatory reform to address obesity. Employing Ahmed's theorisation of 'affective economies' and broader literature on emotional cultures, we argue that obesity regulations achieve popular support within affective economies oriented to neoliberal and in idualist constructions of obesity. These economies preclude constructions of obesity as a structural problem in popular discourse instead positioning anti-obesity regulations as a government-endorsed vehicle for discrimination directed at obese people. Findings implicate a new set of ethical challenges for those ch ioning regulatory reform for obesity prevention.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 16-05-2012
Abstract: Mothers are expected to monitor their children’s dietary intakes and physical activities and are blamed for over feeding their children if they are obese. Women are also urged to manage their own weight in preparation for conception and during pregnancy in order to reduce complications associated with maternal obesity at childbirth. Through a theoretical lens of maternal blame, we argue that Australian media representations of scientific studies of the fetal overnutrition hypothesis extend behavioural maternal blame to the interiority of women’s bodies. Women’s intrauterine environments are positioned in the media as central to the intergenerational transmission of obesity, with women portrayed as responsible for passing obesity on to their children (and grandchildren) via biology and ill-informed ‘lifestyle choices’. Linking in with historical and contemporary discourses of maternal bodies and in idual responsibility, the implications of the ‘double damage’ caused by women entails a concerning return to essentialism in which women’s bodies are being largely blamed for producing and reproducing obesity across generations.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 2000
DOI: 10.1177/136345930000400106
Abstract: This article draws upon anthropological research conducted with a group of people who have a diagnosis of schizophrenia and are living in a major Australian city. The analysis aims to show how these men and women experience their bodies at a day-to-day level, focusing on how they talk about their bodies, awareness of their bodies, and the relation of their bodies to the lived world. Rather than rely on established psychiatric classificatory models of interpretation, experiences are relocated within a broader framework of embodiment and social practice. The article argues that schizophrenia is not solely a ‘disorder of the mind’, but an experience which embodies and reproduces a multiplicity of cultural meanings associated with the concept of privacy. Through the close examination of one case study, the cultural logic of privacy is unpacked and shown to be at the core of many bodily experiences associated with schizophrenia. Reinterpreting such experiences in this light has implications for the ways in which those with schizophrenia are understood and treated.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 24-10-2013
Abstract: In this article, we examine the ethical and methodological tensions entailed in doing qualitative research in obesity studies. Framing our own embodied engagements through critical social theory, we consider how cultural meanings associated with obesity are silenced and negotiated in the research process. This negotiation is fraught with linguistic and corporeal challenges, beginning with the decision to use (or not use) the word obesity in research materials. Obesity is a visible stigma, and we argue that silencing language does not erase the tacit judgments that accompany discursive categorization. It is in a broader context of power relations that we examine the relationship between researcher and participant bodies and the ways in which collective knowingness about fat bodies underpins methodological engagement. The simultaneous presence and absence of obesity have a significant impact on the research process, in shaping both participants’ experiences and the researcher’s actions and interpretations.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 24-02-2022
DOI: 10.1177/1357034X211070041
Abstract: Some Indigenous Australians have embraced developmental origins of health and disease (DOHaD) and epigenetic discourses to highlight the legacies of slow violence in a settler colonial context. Despite important differences between Indigenous and scientific knowledges, some Indigenous scholars are positioning DOHaD and epigenetics as a resource to benefit their communities. This article argues that time plays a crucial role of brokering disparate knowledge spaces in Indigenous discourses of postgenomics, with both Indigenous cosmological frames and DOHaD/epigenetics centring a circular temporal model. Drawing on interview data with scientists who work in Indigenous health, and broader ethnographic work in Indigenous Australian contexts where epigenetics is deployed, this article explores how different circularities of space and time become entangled to co-produce narratives of historical trauma. We use the concept of biocircularity to understand the complex ways that Indigenous and postgenomic temporalities are separated and connected, circling each other to produce a postcolonial articulation of postgenomics as a model of collective embodiment and distributed responsibility.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-10-2019
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 17-02-2019
Abstract: A history of colonization inflicts psychological, physical, and structural disadvantages that endure across generations. For an increasing number of Indigenous Australians, environmental epigenetics offers an important explanatory framework that links the social past with the biological present, providing a culturally relevant way of understanding the various intergenerational effects of historical trauma. In this paper, we critically examine the strategic uptake of environmental epigenetics by Indigenous researchers and policy advocates. We focus on the relationship between epigenetic processes and Indigenous views of Country and health—views that locate health not in in idual bodies but within relational contexts of Indigenous ontologies that embody interconnected environments of kin/animals/matter/bodies across time and space. This drawing together of Indigenous experience and epigenetic knowledge has strengthened calls for action including state-supported calls for financial reparations. We examine the consequences of this reimagining of disease responsibility in the context of “strategic biological essentialism,” a distinct form of biopolitics that, in this case, incorporates environmental determinism. We conclude that the shaping of the right to protection from biosocial injury is potentially empowering but also has the capacity to conceal forms of governance through claimants’ identification as “damaged,” thus furthering State justification of biopolitical intervention in Indigenous lives.
Publisher: American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP)
Date: 07-2011
Abstract: Disentangling the effects of maternal depression in toddlerhood from concurrent maternal depression on child behavior is difficult from previous research. Child care may modify any effects of maternal depression on subsequent child behavior, but this has not been widely investigated. We examined the influence of maternal depressive symptoms during toddlerhood on children's behavior at the age of 5 years and investigated if formal or informal child care during toddlerhood modified any relationship observed. Data were available from 438 mothers and their children (227 girls and 211 boys) the mothers who completed questionnaires during the children's infancy, in toddlerhood, and at the age of 5 years. Recurrent maternal depressive symptoms in toddlerhood (when study children were aged 2 and 3½ years) was a significant risk factor for internalizing, externalizing, and total behavior problems when children were aged 5 years. Intermittent maternal depressive symptoms (study child age 2 or 3½ years) did not significantly affect child behavior problems. Formal child care at the age of 2 years modified the effect of recurrent maternal depressive symptoms on total behavior problems at age 5 years. Informal child care in toddlerhood did not significantly affect child behavior problems. Recurrent, but not intermittent, maternal depressive symptoms when children were toddlers were associated with child behavior problems at age 5 years. As little as half a day in formal child care at the age of 2 years significantly modified the effect of recurrent maternal depressive symptoms on total behavior problems. Formal child care for toddlers of depressed mothers may have positive benefits for the child's subsequent behavior.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 12-2010
DOI: 10.1057/STH.2010.2
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 30-07-2018
Abstract: In the last three decades, anthropological analyses of eating disorders have peeled away layers of ‘common sense’ to reveal tacit and often contradictory forces that inhere in people's bodies, practices, and lives. From investigations of institutional practices to analyses of embodied experiences, anthropologists have developed insightful accounts of how local, shared worlds shape disordered eating, and of the grounding of disorder in social structures and relationships that tend to be obscured in clinical and popular interpretations. In this introductory essay, we offer a brief review of anthropological work on eating disorders, with particular emphasis on studies published in the last decade. Attending to person, structure, and bodily being-in-the-world, these anthropological studies reveal multiple cultural logics within which disordered eating practices are embedded. The deciphering of cultural logics forms the basis for this special issue, whose constituent papers interrogate recurring and ongoing eating disorders, with analyses that focus on relapse, ambivalence toward treatment, and the persistence of disordered eating practices. In their shared focus on long-term eating disorders, the papers offer anthropological responses to clinical questions about the low rates of treatment success. As such, the special issue conveys the potential for new productive collaborations between anthropology, policy, and clinical research and practice for the prevention of and effective intervention in eating disorders.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 22-06-2022
DOI: 10.1177/01622439221108239
Abstract: Developmental origins of health and disease (DOHaD) and epigenetics have expanded understanding of how the environment affects the health of women before and during pregnancy—with lifelong health consequences for the fetus. This has translated to a narrow focus on women’s lifestyle during pregnancy, especially for women classified as obese. In this study, we show that psychosocial harms such as distress or shame felt by pregnant women are rarely countenanced in these endeavors. To demonstrate this, we examine published documents about a large set of trials of lifestyle interventions united through an international consortium. Yet there is now a literature in which pregnant women with large bodies report feeling humiliated and a wider literature on the stigma of obesity. We argue that shame is produced and reproduced through the discursive and material knowledge-making scientific practices of DOHaD translation. Interventions that intensify the shame of large body size in pregnancy may be stressful, and neurophysiological stress pathways are well-known within DOHaD to have consequences for fetal development, so these interventions potentially undermine the very processes they set out to protect. A feminist response may protect women from shame and redirect attention to the social and structural determinants of health.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 13-05-2020
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 12-2016
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 09-2005
Abstract: Anorexia can be characterized as a profound transformation in social relations. These transformations occur across a number of overlapping fields, and include a range of institutional and domestic spaces and myriad mundane bodily practices in each. Through an examination of household space and a conventional treatment programme this article demonstrates the ways in which people with anorexia use and transform space. While there are many treatment programmes available for those with a diagnosis of anorexia, the ethnographic focus here is on those who have undergone bed programmes in public hospitals. As a result of the particularities of time and space, these rooms are transformed into intimate spaces that represent domestic bedrooms, thus fundamentally changing the nature of shared space in institutionalized settings. These transformations, however, are not straightforward, for these bedrooms fuse a number of bodily practices (such as eating, sleeping and abluting) that are sharply demarcated in domestic architecture. In these hospital bedrooms, private and public space is conflated, reversed and made ambiguous. Moreover, this article argues that this institutional transformation of space reproduces many of the private practices associated with anorexia, a factor which has been overlooked in the recorded failure of these types of programmes.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 06-2000
DOI: 10.1016/S0277-9536(99)00423-2
Abstract: This paper focuses on the importance of time and space in an Australian medical setting. It draws on research findings from a one year project that aimed to explore community perspectives of, and experiences of medical services in three South Australian women's and community health centres. Both qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection and analysis were used in order to address these objectives. A significant finding was the way in which participants described the organisation and experience of time and space in these centres and how this impacted on their health and well being and that of the community. In analysing these spatio-temporal dimensions and the underlying philosophical structures of women's and community health centres, this paper argues that experiences associated with space and time have a positive effect on health status by: diminishing barriers to health services, improving quality of care, increasing community participation, providing safe places for social interaction and strengthening people's sense of belonging or attachment to a particular community and place. Based on these findings, the authors conclude that the spatio-temporal dimensions of health care provision have empowering and positive impacts on a community's health, a significant finding that has implications for the maintenance and future funding of this style of health service.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 03-2015
DOI: 10.1016/J.SOCSCIMED.2015.01.026
Abstract: This paper examines the spatio-temporal disjuncture between 'the future' in public health obesity initiatives and the embodied reality of eating. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork in a disadvantaged community in South Australia (August 2012-July 2014), we argue that the future oriented discourses of managing risk employed in obesity prevention programs have limited relevance to the immediacy of poverty, contingencies and survival that mark people's day to day lives. Extending Bourdieu's position that temporality is a central feature of practice, we develop the concept of short horizons to offer a theoretical framework to articulate the tensions between public health imperatives of healthy eating, and local 'tastes of necessity'. Research undertaken at the time of Australia's largest obesity prevention program (OPAL) demonstrates that pre-emptive and risk-based approaches to health can fail to resonate when the future is not within easy reach. Considering the lack of evidence for success of obesity prevention programs, over-reliance on appeals to 'the future' may be a major challenge to the design, operationalisation and success of interventions. Attention to local rather than future horizons reveals a range of innovative strategies around everyday food and eating practices, and these capabilities need to be understood and supported in the delivery of obesity interventions. We argue, therefore, that public health initiatives should be located in the dynamics of a living present, tailored to the particular, localised spatio-temporal perspectives and material circumstances in which people live.
No related grants have been discovered for Megan Warin.