ORCID Profile
0000-0002-4990-4372
Current Organisation
University of Adelaide
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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: 12-2019
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 08-2021
DOI: 10.1111/TAJA.12404
Abstract: Theories of vulnerability are most often seen in the anthropology of disaster studies, where socio‐economic and political inequalities produce environmental vulnerabilities, and the people situated in these locations are positioned as vulnerable and dependent 'Others'. Rather than reproduce vulnerability as a concept denoting weakness, this paper seeks to examine the generative capacities of vulnerability practised in parallel in ethnographic and community spaces. As a form of witnessing and participating in and out of differing social worlds, anthropology engages in different vulnerabilities with and between multiple actors. This paper examines how a community program working with families identified as 'disadvantaged' in South Australia strategically uses vulnerability as a productive resource and a practice of care. In theorising vulnerability through parallel practices in both ethnographic approaches and this community program, we argue that vulnerability can be leveraged away from negative welfare discourses towards alternative politics of radical care and social change.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 06-2010
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Date: 2019
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 10-2018
DOI: 10.1016/J.SOCSCIMED.2018.08.035
Abstract: Advance care directives situate persons as rational and self-determining actors who can make anticipatory plans about their futures. This paper critically examines how people interpret in idual and future-oriented approaches to medical decision-making with limited access to information and knowledge, and reduced opportunities to prepare and document their care preferences. Based on ethnographic research with Asian migrant families living in Adelaide, South Australia (August 2015-July 2018), it reveals a discord between planning for a finite future and the contingencies and continuities of social life. It unsettles the detached reasoning that is privileged in end-of-life decision-making and reveals limitations to "do-it-yourself" approaches to advance care directives which, it will be argued, not only forecasts potential futures but also forecloses them. Taking Derrida's critique of death and decision-making as a point of departure, it develops the concept of temporal dissonance as a theoretical framework to articulate the tensions that are constituted in advance care directives. The paper suggests that attention to temporal incongruities may help to shed light on the many complex interpretations of advance care directives and the difficulties of promoting them in erse contexts.
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: Wiley
Date: 21-11-2019
DOI: 10.1111/TAJA.12332
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 06-2010
Abstract: When bodies are conceived as permeable fields our physical forms become inseparable from each other and the world from which they manifest. The extension of one’s subjectivity to include cosmological inities emphasizes the many other bodies which, in some cultural contexts, may overlap and unite with the world. In this article I explore how narratives of a Tibetan Buddhist high-lama’s death and trajectory of lives contain complex formulations of Tibetan theories of embodiment. An ethnographic attendance to biographical writings and teachings at the time of his funerary ceremonies reveals not only how trikaya, or the notion of three bodies, coheres in Tibetan conceptual frameworks, but also how the articulation of these bodies affects new ways to intersubjectively engage with the deceased.
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: Routledge
Date: 08-10-2014
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 20-02-2014
Abstract: Tibetan understandings about the bodies of spiritual teachers or lamas challenge the idea of a singular and bounded form. Tibetan Buddhists believe that the presence of the lama does not depend on their skin-encapsulated temporal body, or a singular lifespan. After death, it is not uncommon for a lama to materialize in other appearances or to become incorporated into the bodies of others through devotees’ consumption of their bodily remains. In this article, I discuss how the European ingestion of the holy bodies of Tibetan lamas creates new possibilities for embodied intersubjectivity, and also how this practice repositions bodily substance in cannibal discourse.
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: 21-07-2022
DOI: 10.1177/1357034X221109125
Abstract: This article examines an Australian c aign to increase organ and tissue donation for transplantation. It analyses the use of the gift rhetoric to promote community awareness and resources, target migrant groups, and recruit cultural and religious leaders to endorse organ and tissue donation as an altruistic act. In unpacking this ‘gift of life’ approach to organ donation, it explores the convergence of medical and religious bodies and pushes beyond uniform determinations of death to reveal how multiple deaths transpire in organ donation. Drawing on recent advances in the anthropology of becoming as a critical lens to examine death and organ donation, it examines how the ‘unfinishedness’ of donor bodies produces new possibilities for understanding donation. This article thus attends to the situated, layered and contradictory sensibilities that open up multiple and malleable understandings of the donation of body parts.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-10-2019
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 30-10-2014
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 12-2021
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 09-03-2023
DOI: 10.1177/12063312231159227
Abstract: Restricting movement is a major focus in policy directives to reduce the spread of COVID-19 in aged care homes. In this article, we rethink dominant framing of restriction through a critical examination of the politics of good care and ethnographic attention to spatial extensions and interdependencies between residents, care workers, and assistive technologies. Drawing on ethnographic observations in two South Australian care facilities, analysis of aged care policies and national inquiries into aged care, and relevant media reporting, we examine how restriction to movement, misconceptualized as a good form of care, has suppressed residents’ physical and social needs and ruptured abling assemblages of resident mobility. We propose that walking alongside aged and frail residents offers new ways for thinking about care and re-abling relational approaches to care in times of crisis.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-2013
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 12-2020
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 07-08-2021
DOI: 10.1177/10497323211023453
Abstract: Informed by values of autonomy and self-determination, advance care planning assumes that in iduals should independently take control of their future health. In this article, we draw on research conducted with Vietnamese health and community workers to problematize in idualized approaches to planning ahead, reframe notions of “cultural and linguistic barriers,” and expose how homogeneous messages about care at the end of life are not readily translatable within and across erse groups. Anthropological and feminist critiques of inclusion and exclusion are used to reorientate Anglophone framings of the in idual and of cultural and linguistic differences. In this article, we suggest that it is the narrow singularity of care for the self—rather than erse relationalities of care—that should be overcome if aging and end-of-life care policy and practice is to be broadened and made relevant to migrant and non-English-speaking groups.
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 Tanya Zivkovic.