The lived experiences of school lunch: an empathy-based study with children in Sweden

ABSTRACT

School lunch is in general regulated through policies and agendas constituted by the perspectives of adults. In this article, we focus on children’s lived experiences of school lunch with a special emphasis on emotions and how they relate to social and physical dimensions. This study draws on empathy-based stories written by 10–11 year olds (n?=?171) from schools in Sweden. We identified three themes: Interaction and exposure, Routines and restrictions and Food and eating. The children’s lived experiences of school lunch and the emotions attached to them are closely associated and intertwined with the socio-spatial dimension of school lunch. A pleasant meal experience seems to require harmonization between the physical and social space whilst negative experiences contain tensions between them, something that actors working with school lunch and school lunch environments should take in consideration when resourcing, planning and scheduling school lunch, and also when designing new school restaurants.     

Taking back taste: feminism,food and visceral politics

Despite much thoughtful agro-food scholarship, the politics of food lacks adequate appreciation because scholars have not developed a means to specify the links between the materialities of food and ideologies of food and eating. This article uses feminist theory to enliven a discussion of what the authors call visceral politics, and thus initiates a project of illustrating the mechanisms through which people's beliefs about food connect with their everyday experiences of food. Recent work on governed eating and material geographies is brought together with poststructural feminism in order to move towards a non-dualistic, visceral understanding of (everyday) socio-political life. In showing how the mind–body whole can be conceived as a singular, albeit ambiguously-unified agent, the article prefigures a more complete disclosure of the play of power in food systems. Food is shown as a means to trace power through the body in order to understand the making of the political (eating) subject. Specifically, reconceptualizing taste and the ‘Slow Food’ (SF) movement of taste education helps to concretize what a visceral politics of food might look like. The authors conclude that appreciating how food beliefs and representations exist materially in the body is crucial to the ability of food-based movements to inspire action across difference and achieve their progressive goals.     

国外人文地理学尺度政治理论研究进展

尺度政治理论产生于生产方式的变革与全球化的深入发展、新自由主义的兴起与治理方式的转型以及西方人文地理学的尺度转向等实践和理论背景中。其研究经历了由重点关注尺度的政治建构到重点关注行动者的话语和实践的转变。以此为基础,从结构-行为-行动者视角可以总结出尺度政治研究的三个方向:作为政治过程的尺度结构转变、跨尺度的政治行为与策略以及跨尺度的政治行动者联系网络。随后,本文回顾了当前研究中的三个案例以进一步阐明尺度政治理论的实践应用以及上述三个方向之间的区别与联系。最后,基于国内语境,本文从理论和实证两方面出发初步探讨了国内下一步研究应重点关注的问题。     

Food mapping: a psychogeographical method for raising food consciousness

Food mapping is a new, participatory, interdisciplinary pedagogical approach to learning about our modern food systems. This method is inspired by the Situationist International's practice of the “dérive” and draws from the discourses of critical geography, the food movement's research on food deserts, and participatory action research. Using a “critical food lens,” this experiential exercise encourages participants to look beyond their plates and think about the health, economic, and ecological impacts of food. This ethnographic activity produces user-generated data and has the potential to transform participants' understanding of how agricultural practices effect other societal institutions.     

Connecting to food: cultivating children in the school garden

School gardens are widely celebrated as spaces to promote health and sustainability by connecting children with their food. While scholars have assessed the effects of gardening in practice, media discourses play a key role in constituting this site. This paper examines how the school garden is discursively constituted within American and Canadian newspaper coverage. The analysis reveals specific forms of connection that are said to flourish in the school garden: between food production and consumption, between bodies and knowledge, and between the urban child and nature. While all children are said to benefit from connecting with their food, these connections are articulated differently in relation to particular bodies and spaces, evident in racialized and classed narratives of stewardship and salvation. As children’s relationship to food is invested with the hopes and fears of collective futures, the discursive construction of the school garden provides crucial insights into contemporary understandings of childhood.     

'It's only as stupid as you are': Children's and adults' negotiation of ICT competence at home and at school

Contemporary discourses about children's use of information and communication technologies (ICT)—which both celebrate children's command of a technology which is seen to be our future, and raise fears that this technology is putting children's emotional well-being at risk—are problematic, resting as they do on essentialist ideas about children, and overt technological determinism. Drawing instead on work within the new social studies of childhood, and the sociology of science and technology, we identify a need for research which examines how children and technology come together in diverse communities of practice. The communities of practice we study are the home- and school-based ICT usage of British school children in the late 1990s. Our research identifies the different ways in which children and adults negotiate children's technical and emotional competence in relation to ICT, and uncovers the varied meanings of childhood and technology which emerge for adults and children in these two socio-spatial environments. These findings not only highlight the spatiality of children's and adults' performances and understandings of ICT competence, but also how these are constituted through the socio-spatial relations which shape the off-line spaces of home and school.     

Brands of youth citizenship and the politics of scale: National Citizen Service in the United Kingdom

This paper explores the politics of scale in the context of youth citizenship. We propose the concept of ‘brands of youth citizenship’ to understand recent shifts in the state promotion of citizenship formations for young people, and demonstrate how scale is crucial to that agenda. As such, we push forward debates on the scaling of citizenship more broadly through an examination of the imaginative and institutional geographies of learning to be a citizen. The paper's empirical focus is a state-funded youth programme in the UK – National Citizen Service – launched in 2011 and now reaching tens of thousands of 15–17 year olds. We demonstrate the ‘branding’ of youth citizenship, cast here in terms of social action and designed to create a particular type of citizen-subject. Original research with key architects, delivery providers and young people demonstrates two key points of interest. First, that the scales of youth citizenship embedded in NCS promote engagement at the local scale, as part of a national collective, whilst the global scale is curiously absent. Second, that discourses of youth citizenship are increasingly mobilised alongside ideas of Britishness yet fractured by the geographies of devolution. Overall, the paper explores the scalar politics and performance of youth citizenship, the tensions therein, and the wider implications of this study for both political geographers and society more broadly at a time of heated debate about youthful politics in the United Kingdom and beyond.     

No-go- area,no-go- school: community discourses,local school market and children's identity work

This article focuses on how 11-year-old children in a segregated Swedish suburb at the time of choosing school for Year 6 in the 9-year compulsory school used current community discourses in their identity work, while constructing an ‘us’ in relation to ‘them’. The segregation in the suburb was strengthened by the process of a school market, with competition among the schools. Even if the formal choice was made by the parents the study shows that the choosing process was also an important part of the children's identity work. The results show differentiations among the children with a majority of children involved in re-constructing both a neighbourhood and the neighbourhood's school as no-go-areas while other children rather choose that school.     

Losing it in Hawai‘i: Weight Watchers and the paradoxical nature of weight gain and loss

In Hawai‘i, bodies may be big, successful, widely accepted, and revered by their public, yet some subjects may simultaneously be seeking a thinner body even with what appears to be ‘fat acceptance’ by many state residents. This article analyses weight and weight loss narratives of two prominent public and nonwhite men, Israel Kamakawiwo‘ole and Sam Choy. We connect these narratives to Weight Watchers International discourses of slimming as these apply to ‘nonwhite’ subjects in Hawai‘i. We suggest that Weight Watchers normalizes thinness through discourses of whiteness inherent in particular foods. Hawai‘i's regional cuisine known as ‘Local Food’ is framed as ‘exotic,’ which is distinct from what the organization proposes is ‘good’ food that produces ‘healthy’ bodies. Weight Watchers narrates slim bodies and health while normalizing ‘white’ cuisine and the bodies who consume it thereby excluding Local brown bodies in Hawai‘i.     

The Social Production of Latin@ Visibilities and Invisibilities: Geographies of Power in Small Town America

This paper explores the sociospatial dynamics unfolding in Perry, a rural Iowa town that has been facing rapid change since the 1990s due to growing Latin@ settlement. We focus on what we call the social production of Latin@ visibilities and invisibilities: spatialized practices by individuals, families, communities, and institutions that render different Latin@ groups visible or invisible, with repercussions for survival, community integration, and political praxis. We discuss the border within as an extension of border politics and borderlands rhetorics to the US “heartland”, and how the entrenchment of a regime of deportability creates racialized and gendered conditions for the in/visibility of Latin@ immigrants and Latin@s more broadly. We conclude by considering some of the theoretical and political implications of our analysis for such geographies of power and the social relations, locations, and discourses that constitute and are constituted by them.     

Inside and outside the school lunchbox: themes and reflections

We examine here the discourses surrounding the lunchbox taken to school by children: aspects both of the contents and of how children consume and understand these.1 The observations presented here form part of the preliminary stages of a broader project examining ‘Men, Children and Food’. The project itself is part of a large research programme – ‘Changing Families, Changing Food’ – funded by the Leverhulme Trust (award number F/00118/AQ) from 2006 to 2008, and situated at the University of Sheffield, working in collaboration with colleagues at Royal Holloway University of London. Our aims, in ‘Men, Children and Food’, are to explore the experiences of fathers (and other male figures in the household) and of children, in relation to food practices, including ways in which the two interconnect. View all notes Examples within and beyond the UK suggest that the lunchbox is a container for various aspects of the private and public. What traces can be found inside of wider social relations, including processes of care and surveillance? We argue that the lunchbox consists of intersecting spatialities, within which children constitute a public face, and create identities, relationships and subjectivities; this perspective frames opportunities for priorities in future empirical research with children.     

Scale, Sovereignty, and Strategy in Environmental Governance

Close examination of the scalar politics of environmental organizations engaged in contesting the terms of neoliberal globalization highlights four limitations of current theorizations of scale in radical geography. First, this body of work has paid little attention to environmental NGOs and movements as important actors in scalar politics. This is not only an empirical gap, but a theoretical one: taking environmental actors and issues into account requires rethinking the ontologies and dynamics in scale theory. Second, recent attention to social reproduction in scale debates must be extended to the reproduction of environmental conditions. Third, sharp analytical distinctions between scalar structuration and the production of nature are untenable and reproduce a culture/nature dualism. Fourth, sharp distinctions between politics within or about established scales, versus politics among scales, are unstable and miss the precise strategies pursued in some politics of scale. These arguments are illustrated and explored via case material drawn from current struggles over efforts to define environmental governance as a form of regulatory expropriation in international trade agreements.     

Italian cultural geography,or the history of a prolific absence

This article focuses on a group of buildings that form the site for a Steiner school in Pembrokeshire, West Wales. It examines the ways in which an environmentally friendly, ‘ecological’ structure was (and is) constructed such that the building and its accompanying practices might be seen as ‘performed art’. By more critically examining the school's geographies through ethnographic material, the paper moves away from the buildings' symbolic meanings to demonstrate how art and nature intersect in various ways, in the school's life. Art and nature were crucial to the type of education there, the physical process of building the school, and daily uses of the buildings. The paper also explores how the art-nature intersection is involved in the construction of ethical discourses and practices constitutive of ‘childhood’ and ‘education’.     

The Italian political system and détente (1963 - 1981)

This article examines the impact of détente on the Italian political system, linking together internal and international dynamics in both the political and the economic spheres. Relying on various new archival sources, it analyzes the conflicting effects on Italy of both the relaxing of Cold War tension and bipolarism, and the 'bipolar' strategy to reassert US hegemony: the failure of the reformist design of the center?-?left of the 1960s; the 'strategy of attention' in 1969?-?71 and its sudden halt; the building of a 'devaluation model' after the end of Bretton Woods, and the consequent shift from Kissinger's neo-centrism to 'national solidarity'. Détente favoured a crisis of the centrist pattern of Italian politics but at the same time the 'bipolar' features of both the US and the Soviet 'strategies of détente' led to a decline in US hegemony, relaunching the DC's centrality and its ability to manage external constraints. Reaganism was to recast US hegemony on a new basis.     

Renegotiating the Primary School: Children's Emotional Geographies of Sport,Exercise and Active Play

The current UK policy concern with children's health has led to primary school practices of sport, exercise and active play aimed, in particular, at constructing children's bodies as ‘healthy’. Qualitative explorations of children's own values and experiences however, reveal that their understandings of sport in school differ considerably from its potential to be healthy, instead emphasising emotional geographies of pleasure and enjoyment. This article aims to develop a better understanding of children's ability to modify and reconstitute discursive corporeal regimes through their own agency, thus highlighting the fluid nature of the primary school as an institution. Adult discourses and children's bodily challenges to these mingle and intersect, creating spaces of competing values and discourses that work to transform and renegotiate the primary school. Although this article focuses particularly on the UK context, the findings will be relevant for any country in which child obesity is of current concern for social and education policy.     

The Neoliberalization of Development: Trade Capacity Building and Security at the US Agency for International Development

Abstract: This paper examines recent changes at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) regarding the connections between trade liberalization, development, and security. USAID has adopted “trade capacity building” as a framework for development, and, in conjunction with new US national security discourses, now operates under the assumption that underdevelopment is a source of state weakness that produces insecurity. I argue that these changes in how USAID understands and undertakes development constitute the neoliberalization of development. In accordance with these shifts, USAID has redefined critical aspects of its development mission, undergone internal restructuring, and altered its relationship with other US state institutions and capital. The actual prospects for achieving security or development are slim, however, as the agency remains wedded to definitions of both that suggest the only acceptable role for the state lies in facilitating further neoliberalization and promoting the stability of capitalist class relations. An overview of USAID's historical development, and a closer examination of the place of food aid and food security in the agency's development work, demonstrate this.     

Globalization and the power of rescaled narratives: A case of opposition to mining in Tambogrande,Peru

In this article, we criticize the bipolar polemic on globalization that tends to be limited to arguing over its desirability or destructiveness, and argue that it is necessary to probe deeper into the power relationships that are produced by the restructuring of relationships in time and space. The theoretical debate on politics of scale opens the way to investigate the reconfiguration of scalar organization in capitalism, which has complex and contradictory effects on power relations. It demonstrates that oppositional politics can ‘jump scale’ by rearticulating issues at larger scales to mobilize leverage. We criticize the debate on ‘politics of scale’ for leaving several central questions relatively unexplored: what is the actual relation between jumping scale and empowerment, and what type of empowerment are we talking about? With reference to a case study of a mining conflict in Tambogrande, Peru, we discuss the way in which local farmers were able to network with organizations at national and international scales and rearticulate their claims at these scales. The case demonstrates that globalization enabled the opposition narrative to be rescaled. Hence, globalization can be seen as a redistribution of potential for empowerment. The case also shows, however, that rescaling necessitated a rearticulation of political claims to accommodate hegemonic discourses at the national and international scales.     

FAO from the Field and from Below: Emma Reh and the Challenges of Doing Nutrition Work in Central America

While much of the historical literature on FAO has adopted a headquarter perspective, this article examines FAO's nutrition activities in Central America from the vantage point of a field worker stationed in the region during the 1950s. Emma Reh's professional background broadens our understanding of the careers of staff members in international organizations and makes visible the connections between the US Indian Bureau and development work. Correspondence and field reports shed light on FAO's difficulties in establishing a strong presence in Central America. Moreover, the article shows that dietary surveys with their socio-economic perspectives on nutrition were underfunded as well as marginalized in the processes of knowledge production and diffusion while a medicalized approach to nutrition took hold at the FAO Nutrition Division. In the early1960s, the FAO Nutrition Division returned to a less reductive view on nutrition.     

Assembling Justice Spaces: The Scalar Politics of Environmental Justice in North-east England

Abstract:  In contrast to the US environmental justice movement, which has been successful in building a networked environmentalism that recognises—and has impacted upon—national patterns of distributional (in)equalities, campaigns in the UK have rarely developed beyond the local or articulated a coherent programme of action that links to wider socio-spatial justice issues or effects real changes in the regulatory or political environment. Our purpose in this paper is to extend research which explores the spatial politics of mobilisation, by attending to the multi-scalar dynamics embedded in the enactment of environmental justice (EJ) in north-east England. It is an approach that is indebted to recent work on the scalar politics of EJ, and also to the network ideas associated with actor-network theory (ANT)-inspired research on human–nature relations. Our account provides preliminary reflections on the potential for an "assemblage" perspective which draws together people, texts, machines, animals, devices and discourses in relations that collectively constitute—and scale—EJ. To conclude, and building upon this approach, we suggest future research avenues that we believe present a promising agenda for critical engagement with the production, scaling and politics of environmental (in)justice.     

Engagement or empire? American power and the international order

Three recent surveys of American foreign relations lie at the intersection of topical academic and policy debates. Robert Lieber's Eagle rules? makes a case for American primacy as a precondition for global stability, and in so doing reflects an agenda for US foreign policy that is broadly associated with the current Bush administration. By contrast, Joseph Nye's The paradox of American power argues against US unilateralism, and may be read as an implicit critique of the apparent recent shift in American strategy. Nevertheless, both Lieber and Nye make a case for extensive American engagement with the world as a basis for international stability. By contrast, Chalmers Johnson's Blowback views America's global ‘engagement’ as a thinly disguised diplomatic veil for imperialism. Although they make very different arguments, these three books are usefully considered together. Nye's stress on the importance of soft power, multilateral diplomacy and wider structural changes in the nature of world politics is a useful corrective to Lieber's emphasis on US primacy. But Johnson is right to criticize the excessive and ultimately counter‐productive level of military involvement of the United States around the world. In the absence of a more effective global balance of power, the preconditions for a robust system of international diplomacy as well as the management of globalization will not be satisfied.