Choosing Health? Exploring Children's Eating Practices at Home and at School

Abstract:  This paper considers the influences on children's eating habits in both school and home spaces in the UK. Since 2002 the UK government has been committed to halting the increase in child obesity rates, and has sanctioned particular parental and school based practices as more "healthy" than others. This study examines this through critically questioning, in particular, the classed discourses written into health education advice and advocates a new way of thinking about health education messages. Based on qualitative research with children from one secondary school and with eight families in the North of England the paper reveals that while parents and children make decisions about their lives with reference to dominant discourses about ideal "healthy" family eating practices, their ability to realise these practices is limited in numerous ways. Moreover, the influences on children's eating habits in both home and school spaces are intricately interrelated and children's practices are clearly influenced by the spaces they inhabit. Their decisions involve balancing health education knowledge with a range of other knowledges that are bound up in the socio-spatial relations of their everyday lives. A holistic approach to understanding children's eating habits therefore requires a critical understanding of class background, parental influences and contemporary parenting practices as well as the microgeographical relations found in the school dining room.     

The Implications of Parenting Standards in Child Protection: A Paradox in Disability Policy

Contemporary parenting standards in the field of child protection produce a paradox in disability policy. Focusing on the protections necessary for child safety, child protection workers are apt stereotypically to discount the abilities of parents with disabilities to raise their children. This situation runs a wide spectrum. It includes parents fully capable of parenting with no outside assistance who are nevertheless denied their children on the basis of completely baseless stereotypical assumptions. It includes parents who are mentally fully capable of parenting, but who are denied the necessary personal assistance services to perform the physical tasks of child care. This article, however, focuses on yet another situation: parents with mental, emotional, or cognitive disabilities who, without assistance to perform the cognitive tasks necessary for safely raising children, could neglect their children. It discusses this situation in light of the Americans with Disabilities Act and various state laws that protect the civil rights of persons with disabilities.     

Creative geographies of ceramic artists: knowledges and experiences of landscape,practices of art and skill

This paper argues for a conception of art as an embodied and creative material practice. It draws on research conducted with seven professional ceramic artists who deal with landscape in their work to explore their processes of art-making through interview and (filmed) observation. It demonstrates the distributed range of embodied and relational more-than-artistic practices which inform how landscape is encountered, known and ultimately represented. It argues that artists’ self-expression in art is based upon material, social and political knowledges which interweave in artists’ lives. By studying ceramicists’ making this paper demonstrates both the non-conscious skill and the conscious technical knowledge needed to make art. It shows chance to have a triple role in practices of making, as something to work alongside, to work against and to draw on as a creative resource. This paper both argues for and demonstrates the value of an approach to art-making that frames it as a complex of both conscious, socio-cultural, technical knowledges and non-conscious skills which together (in)form works of (ceramic) art.     

The Negative Effects of Insufficient Support Systems on Kuwaiti Mothers of Children with Disabilities

Parents raising a child with a physical or cognitive disability are often faced with the negative stigma against disabilities that exist in several Arab countries. This puts extra pressure on the parents and can lead to negative outcomes for the children. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of parenting stress and varying levels of support for mothers of children with disabilities and the effects of these pressures on their relationship with their disabled child. We surveyed 85 Kuwaiti mothers of children with disabilities. The participants filled out an online survey with questions regarding parenting related stress, perceived social support, feelings of social isolation, self‐efficacy, and attachment to their child. Results indicate that mothers who feel unsupported by their families, community, and government experience more parenting stress and greater social isolation. These in turn lead them to feel less competent in their parenting abilities, and ultimately they feel less emotionally connected to their child. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

Travelling in your backyard: the unfamiliar places of parenting

Current theoretical understandings of family-as-activity, as suggested by the terms ‘doing family’ or ‘families we choose’, locate family practices such as parenting, within the realm of the spatial. Feminist geography particularly has been instrumental in conceptualisations of parenting as a spatial project that involves constant renegotiation of the ‘everyday’ spaces of home, work and play. However, what are less evident in the literature are the specificities of the actual places and spaces of parenting: where parents go in the course of their parenting or how they actually use particular spaces. Furthermore, most scholarly work on parenting has been based on the theoretical and material experience of heterosexual parents, with the experiences of non-heterosexual parented families under-documented. Using data from a recent study with lesbian parents, this paper seeks to address some of these conceptual and empirical gaps, suggesting that an exploration of the everyday spatialities of same-sex parenting contributes, not only to expanding current geographic understandings of family and parenting, but also understanding of the material places where these identities—familial, parental, sexual—intersect.     

'My Son's a Bit Dizzy.' 'My Wife's a Bit Soft': Gender,children and cultures of parenting

What it means to be a child and what it means to be a parent are both cultural inventions, ideologies which are (re)constructed and (re)produced over time. The two are deeply intertwined. The dominant contemporary Western imagining of children as vulnerable and incompetent in public space contributes towards structuring the way that parents look after their offspring and determine their children's personal geographies. Children's safety in public space from traffic accidents and stranger-dangers is an issue that is high on the public agenda in the USA and UK, heightening parental anxieties about the amount of independence and spatial freedom they should grant their offspring. Mothers' and fathers' understandings of their children's safety and the culture and conduct of parenting are gendered processes. This paper therefore explores how parents' attitudes towards girls' and boys' respective vulnerabilities and competencies to handle danger in public space vary. It then goes on to consider the way that parental practices, such as taking responsibility for managing children's spatial boundaries and disciplining them for any infringements, are also gendered.     

The Politics of Open Defecation: Informality,Body, and Infrastructure in Mumbai

This paper examines the politics of open defecation by focusing on everyday intersections of the body and infrastructure in the metabolic city, which produces profoundly unequal opportunities for fulfilling bodily needs. Specifically, it examines how open defecation emerges in Mumbai's informal settlements through everyday embodied experiences, practices and perceptions forged in relation to the materialities of informality and infrastructure. It does so by tracing the micropolitics of provision, access, territoriality and control of sanitation infrastructures; everyday routines and rhythms, both of people and infrastructures; and experiences of disgust and perceptions of dignity. It also examines open defecation as embodied spatial and temporal improvisations in order to investigate the socially differentiated efforts and risks that it entails. More broadly, the paper seeks to deepen understandings of the relationship between the body, infrastructure and the sanitary/unsanitary city.     

Watch out for the neighborhood trap! A case study on parental perceptions of and strategies to counter risks for children in a disadvantaged neighborhood

Neighborhood is seen as one of the many social contexts that shape children's cognitive, emotional and social development. However, the neighborhood context does not simply ‘imprint’ itself on children, but can be mediated or moderated by other social contexts, in particular the family context through parenting practices. Based on a case study in a low income neighborhood in The Hague, The Netherlands, this paper addresses the question of how living in a disadvantaged neighborhood context constitutes a risk for children and which strategies parents develop in response to the perceived negative neighborhood influences.     

Early parenting and the urban experience: risk,community, play and embodiment in an East London neighbourhood

This article will critically examine theories of risk – referred to in this article as ‘pro-risk’ – as applied to parenting cultures in the UK through a case study of early years parenting, based in Walhamstow, East London. Common to all of these theories is an assertion that children are over-parented – a product of economic, social and cultural changes such as the decline of community as well as theories of child-centred parenting. Through the close examination of two examples where risk and community were contested, the article will argue that missing from these theories is an understanding of the embodiments of early years parenting, which underpin the way that parents handle the tensions between risk and development. Further, that parents sought to militate against isolation and the decline of community through local parenting networks.     

Fitting in: the embodied politics of race in Seattle's desegregated schools

By considering the performative dimensions of racial identity construction, this paper joins recent calls to more fully incorporate the materiality of the body into geographical treatments of race (McKittrick 2000; Nash 2003; Saldanha 2006). Through an analysis of school desegregation in Seattle, Washington, this analysis investigates the ways in which students of different racial backgrounds negotiated the multiracial environments at their schools. Specifically, I examine how students' racial identities are worked through embodied practices as both conscious and unconscious attempts to fit into particular social realms. Drawing on performativity theory, I show how students actively mobilized their bodies to negotiate belongings that were ostensibly foreclosed by the primacy of phenotype. This paper suggests that by focusing on the active work that the body does in the social construction of race we can better theorize the ways in which racial categories are both reproduced and destabilized through everyday life.     

Emerging geographies of disciplining the ageing body: practising cosmetic technologies in the aesthetic clinic

Despite attention to the body over the last two decades, there has been a lack of geographical consideration of the emotional and embodied contexts of ageing. In this article I argue that examination of the multiple ways in which the ageing body is experienced and modified offers productive insights into geographical perspectives on gender, health and technology. This article introduces cosmetic anti-ageing practices as a form of ‘management’ and ‘modification’ of the ageing body. Anti-ageing practices have become increasingly ubiquitous in the last decade and are a significant driver of growth and innovation in the cosmetic industry. Despite their prevalence, however, there has been a lack of geographical attention to the knowledges, practices and spaces associated with cosmetic modification of the ageing body. This article draws on ethnographic and interview data from extensive fieldwork conducted in a range of aesthetic clinics in South-West England, exploring the emotional, embodied and spatial encounters of anti-ageing practices and the intertwining, and explicitly gendered, discourses of health and well-being in which they are situated.     

VICO'S NEW SCIENCE AND A NEW POETIC PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

This review essay discusses Giambattista Vico and the New Psychological Science, which contains seven essays that challenge traditional anthropological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions that define psychology as a social science and instead interpret it as an embodied understanding of human cultural activity. The authors use Vico's New Science to support this endeavor because, they suggest, it traces the creation of human existence from a prehuman animal state with the agency of poiesis, an embodied meta‐phoric language and social practices that are inseparable from that language. This effort is a potentially transformative reinterpretation of Vico, whose verum factum principle scholars interpret as challenging Cartesian epistemology. Identifying the true with the made, Vico's principle limits human knowing to what humans make—that is, their historical world. The authors rightly emphasize the embodied nature of making with poetic language and social practices. However, they undermine the significance of that embodiment by assuming that knowing what is made with poiesis is, like traditional understandings of knowledge, epistemic. Thus, they implicitly retain humanism's metaphysical assumption that grounds epistemology: humans know intelligible reality because they are dualistic beings who possess rational, subjective natures. By contrast, I claim that Vico's poetic humanism is a more radical move from traditional humanism's belief in epistemology toward a culturally active anthropology. For Vico, bodily skills of perception, memory, and imagination create a metaphoric language based on random perceptions, images, and sounds. This metaphoric language is inseparable from social practices and physical skills, creating a meaningful human world. The making achieved by embodied poetic language cannot lead to epistemic knowledge; it can only lead to the self‐referential hermeneutic understanding that humans are the creators of their human existence. Vico's verum factum is not an epistemological principle in the Cartesian tradition but an ontological unity of knowing and making through sociophysical skills that are inseparable from poetic language. Humans make their ontologically real, meaningful human world and know themselves as its creators.     

Children, ‘healthy’ food,school and family: the ‘[n]ot really’ outcome of school food messages

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on a multi-method study with 50 families in Victoria, Australia. Primary school children were asked about food knowledge from school and whether they felt motivated to bring knowledge home. Generally, children and parents felt school food messages are unclear, contradictory and not relevant to them and this reduced the likelihood of messages coming home from school. We identify a critical difference in how families thought about healthy eating and food practices at home and the framework of school messages. Families focused on children’s eating in a pragmatic way, infused with nurturance as well as concern. We argue their practices can be viewed as a form of relational consumption (Lindsay and Maher 2013. Consuming Families: Buying, Making, Producing Family Life in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Routledge.) where food is part of the everyday exchange of love and care. A disjunction exists between familial relational approaches and the regulatory framework of school food messages that impacts how messages move between these spaces. Attention to relational aspects of food consumption at school might allow for a more valuable exchange between family and schools that supports family endeavours to feed children well.     

Regulating Body Boundaries and Health during the Second World War: Nationalist Discourse,Media Representations and the Experiences of Canadian Women War Workers

This article examines the intersections of gender, wartime nationalist rhetoric and the production of ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ bodies in both the Canadian workplace and the home during the Second World War. Analysing government, industry and media discourses in relation to oral history interviews with thirty‐eight women aircraft workers, we discuss women's distinctive role in shaping the health and morale of the social body during wartime, to ensure the maintenance of family, nation and the Allied war effort. While health in wartime was defined in terms of worker productivity for both men and women, anxiety about women's expanded roles heightened the emphasis on moral respectability as a marker of the ‘healthy’ female body. This was further complicated by the wartime emphasis on women's responsibilities to boost morale as part of their role in maintaining health and productivity for both men and women. Through such examples as workplace regulations and domestic advice, we examine the increased monitoring of women's individual and collective bodies and the intensified demands on female war workers as they crossed between the public and private spheres. We use our oral histories to examine women's embodied memories of ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ bodies within a regional context and their responses to government, industry and media discourses.     

‘Watching like a hawk’: gendered parenting in automobilized urban spaces

The growing interest in automobility theory and feminist perspectives on daily mobility points to the importance of considering parental mobility care of children. Hanson (2010, Gender, Place & Culture 17(1), 5–23) argues that feminists have long known that gender and mobility are bound together but have not sufficiently examined their contexts. The article extends this approach in its exploration of parental mobility care practices. It illustrates how automobility constructs disciplined parental practices to immobilize and safeguard children. Conversely, it shows how parental mobility care practices use, generate and resist automobility. These practices, the article argues, are deeply embedded within contexts of gender and automobility that (re)produce social inequalities. This analysis, which emerged out of our qualitative, interpretive approach, suggests new ways of thinking about automobility and parenting in relation to one another. The research is based on in-depth interviews with parents located in four urban areas in Vancouver, British Columbia.     

Feeling our way: academia,emotions and a politics of care

This paper aims to better understand the role of emotions in academia, and their part in producing, and challenging, an increasingly normalised neoliberal academy. It unfolds from two narratives that foreground emotions in and across academic spaces and practices, to critically explore how knowledges and positions are constructed and circulated. It then moves to consider these issues through the lens of care as a political stance towards being and becoming academics in neoliberal times. Our aim is to contribute to the burgeoning literature on emotional geographies, explicitly bringing this work into conversation with resurgent debates surrounding an ethic of care, as part of a politic of critiquing individualism and managerialism in (and beyond) the academy. We consider the ways in which neoliberal university structures circulate particular affects, prompting emotions such as desire and anxiety, and the internalisation of competition and audit as embodied scholars. Our narratives exemplify how attendant emotions and affect can reverberate and be further reproduced through university cultures, and diffuse across personal and professional lives. We argue that emotions in academia matter, mutually co-producing everyday social relations and practices at and across all levels. We are interested in their political implications, and how neoliberal norms can be shifted through practices of caring-with.     

Geographies of migration and relatedness: transmigrancy in open transnational adoptive parenting

Current transnational adoptive parenting is characterized by ambiguous practices of (1) discursively distancing adoptive children from immigrants, while (2) symbolically or actually reconnecting newly constituted families to children's birth countries through charity and culture work. This ambiguity reveals the ubiquity of contradictory and essentialist understandings of categories of familial and national belonging. However, adoptive parents’ strategies for accommodating their children's sense of belonging may also open up space for rethinking care and family building in transnational contexts. Using the case of a Belgian family who adopted a 12-year-old girl from Ethiopia, decided to maintain strong connections with the child's biological family, engage in charity work in Ethiopia and forge strong ties with immigrant communities in Belgium, the article explores how the concept of ‘transmigration’ may further our understanding of identity configurations within adoptive families. Furthermore, this particular case of ‘open’ transnational adoptive parenting testifies to adoptive parents’ efforts to escape from essentialist and exclusionary frameworks and create counter-spaces of multiplicity and transmigrancy in a context of severe social and economic inequality.     

Interpretive field geomorphology as cognitive,social, embodied and affective epistemic practice

This article examines the epistemic practices of interpretive field geomorphology—that is, the in-the-moment act of “seeing the landscape” geomorphologically. Drawing on the philosophical works of Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty, it aims to bring to light the complex, multi-dimensional, knowledge-producing process of field observation and interpretation. Methodologically the study is based on geomorphologists' accounts of their fieldwork, gathered through questionnaire and interviews. By paying attention to what geomorphologists say they are doing in the field, interpretive field geomorphology is articulated as a combined cognitive, social, embodied, and affective experience through which understanding is arrived at. The paper thus sheds light on one part of what Brierley et al. call “the dark art” of geomorphological interpretation, and draws out implications in terms of researcher positionality, researcher training, and offering an epistemic justification for field-based pedagogies.