Food Study Group Archive

2021 Events

21-23 June 2021
Food & Food Systems in a time of Insecurity: the 7th BSA Food Study Group Conference
Online

13 May 2021 (4:00–5:00pm GMT)
Ashante Reese, Austin Texas University
Online

11 March 2021 (4:00–5:00pm GMT)
Sarah Bowen, North Carolina State University
Online

11 February 2021 (4:00–5:00pm GMT)
Tasting Displacement: Food Justice in the Age of Gentrification - International Seminar Series
Online

14 January 2021 (4:00–5:00pm GMT)
Diners, Dudes & Diets: How Gender and Power Collide in Food Media & Culture - International Seminar Series
Online

2019 Events

24–25 June 2019
Sixth BSA Food Study Group Conference: Food Systems & Society 2019 - Re-Imagining Food Systems, Sustainability, Futures and the Everyday
Monash University, Prato, Italy -  PROGRAMME

2018 Events

SEMINAR - ‘I am pleased to shop somewhere that is fighting the supermarkets a little bit’. A cultural political economy of alternative food networks
Speaker:  Dr. David Watts, University of Aberdeen

2016 Events

2014 Events

2013 Events

14 June 2013
Food, Drink and Hospitality: Space, Materiality, Practice - PROGRAMME
BSA Meeting Room, London, UK

11 February 2013
Food for thought: Some tensions between sociology and health promotion in relation to obesity
Professor Rosaline Barbour, Professor of Health Care, Faculty of Health & Social Care, The Open University
University of Westminster, London, UK

This paper critically reflects on my experience of conducting health services research on obesity in the context of several projects spanning the past 15 years.  At least on the surface, there might appear to be a comfortable fit between health promotion concerns and the medical sociological focus on illuminating participants’ understandings and meanings.  However, in practice, research at this particular interface raises a number of difficult issues and highlights some uncomfortable – but potentially analytically fruitful - tensions.  These are explored with reference to findings from these empirical studies, with the aim not simply of highlighting disjuncture and potential conflict, but with a view to suggesting possible ways forward.  Most notably it will consider the potential of sociology – and focus groups as a method -  to provide a more nuanced understanding of the small group/community setting that is potentially very important both for theorizing about obesity and for addressing this issue in practical terms.  This middle ground is often overlooked in debates that focus on the polarities of epidemiology’s population focus and the individualised approach most frequently adopted by health promotion initiatives.

Rosaline (Rose) Barbour is currently Professor of Health Care at the Open University (UK).   A medical sociologist, her research career has covered a wide variety of topics located at the intersection of the clinical and the social - e.g. HIV/AIDS; reproductive health and fertility; psychosocial health; obesity; and the sociology of recovery (most recently in relation to young adults with cancer and their concerns about future fertility).  Her theoretical interests center on the links between identity and agency, and social and cultural capital.

Rose has a particular interest in rigor in qualitative research and has published widely on this topic in a range of academic journals. Reflecting her conviction that qualitative research is a craft skill, Rose has developed an innovative series of ‘hands-on’ qualitative methods workshops. She has been invited to present these workshops throughout the UK, in Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, France, Austria, the US and Canada.  She co-edited  (with Jenny Kitzinger) Developing Focus Group Research: Politics, Theory and Practice (Sage, 1999). Her most recent books - Doing Focus Groups (Sage, 2007/8 – Book 4 of the Sage Qualitative Methods Kit) and Introducing Qualitative Research: A Student Guide to the Craft of Doing Qualitative Research (Sage, 2008; 2nd edition in preparation) - bring together and share the expertise she has developed through running workshops for a variety of audiences over the past 20 years.

2012 Events

23 November 2012
‘The Mouth’ - Dr Barry Gibson, Senior Lecturer in Medical Sociology, University of Sheffield
ROOM C2.07, University of Westminster, Cavendish Campus, 115 New Cavendish Street, London, UK

The presentation takes as its core problematic the extent to which the mouth has been constituted as a theme for sociology. The aim of this paper is therefore to present a brief sketch of existing perspectives on the mouth, to highlight gaps in the literature and evaluate the possibilities for further work on the mouth as an object of sociological enquiry. The paper begins by exploring how the mouth became separated from the body and rendered visible though the techniques of power and knowledge associated with the dental discipline. The paper then goes on to detail how such constructivist accounts of the mouth can be contrasted with the problem of commodification and how this might be related to the separation of the mouth from the body. The commodification of the mouth is closely related to how different groups in society have become separated by the way in which mouths can act as symbols of one’s citizenship status, as elite citizen, failed consumer illegal immigrant or otherwise. The mouth is then explored through the perspective of historical anthropology, especially in relation to its function as a permeable boundary between inside and out. In this respect the civilising processes associated with the closing of the mouth are also discussed. The paper then goes on to approach the mouth as a part of everyday life by presenting work on ‘mouth rules’, identity and permeability in everyday life. The paper concludes by exploring future possibilities for work on the mouth.

2-3 July 2012
3rd BSA Food Study Group Conference: FOOD & SOCIETY - PROGRAMME
The British Library Conference Centre, London, UK

21 May 2012
Continuity and Change: Aspects of the Food Environment across the Life Course
Sheila Peace, John Percival, Faculty of Health & Social Care, The Open University; Martin Maguire, Colette Nicolle, Russ Marshall and Ruth Sims, Loughborough University Design School
The Library at Thomas Coram Research Unit, IOE, 27-28 Woburn Square, London WC1H 0AA.

Across the life course, the kitchen can be a central hub of activity. Long discussed as gendered space, in ageing populations the kitchen provides a perfect case study for addressing issues of person-environment interaction where age, gender, class, culture, health and well-being are central.

This paper reports on research involving social gerontologists, ergonomists and designers which studied ‘Transitions in Kitchen Living’ (TiKL) as part of the ESRC’s New Dynamics of Ageing Programme.  The aim was to work with a purposive sample of people in their 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s living across the range of mainstream and supportive housing where the kitchen was still very much a part of everyday life. Following detailed pilot work, two interviews were conducted with 48 older participants (aged 61 to 91 years, born between 1919 and 1949) in Bristol and Loughborough. Prior to the first interview, people were asked to record a housing history and then using an oral history approach people’s experiences of kitchens throughout their lives were recorded prompted by key life events. A second Interview concerned their contemporary kitchen and how well it met their needs. Other tools gathered personal demographic details, routine activities, and photographs recorded aspects of the kitchen that were particularly liked or disliked.

This talk focuses on both the oral history data and the study of the contemporary kitchen to understand how issues of continuity and change throughout the 20th century as food equipment developed in diverse housing circumstances.  For example early experience of cooking in a coal fired oven led to the coming of gas and electric cookers while ‘staying put’ for an older person may now depend on microwavable food.

Dr. Sheila Peace is Professor of Social Gerontology.  A social geographer by first discipline, she gained her PhD in the area of environment and ageing now her area of expertise.  She is co-editor of Ageing in Society: European perspectives in Gerontology, Sage Publications (2007).

Monday, 27 February 2012 (Rescheduled date)
Elements For A Sociological Theory Of Household Food Waste - David Evans, University of Manchester

Despite the prevalence of concerns – in popular and policy imaginations – about the origins and consequences of food waste, the topic remains woefully under-represented in existing food studies researches. In this presentation, then, I sketch out a sociological theory of household food waste. Drawing on ethnographic examples and adopting a material culture approach to these data, I theorise the processes and relations that accompany the passage of ‘food’ into ‘waste’. To begin I discuss the routine overprovisioning of food and the inevitability that some of this will move into the category of ‘surplus’. Here it is argued that surplus is inscribed in the flow of everyday life as a consequence of the social ordering of food practices and the ways in which these intersect with other practices and systems. Whilst this explains how a certain amount of food that is purchased for consumption comes to be discarded, it does not explain how discarded food comes to be configured as waste. At issue here is the importance of moving beyond the unfortunate conjunction of disposal and waste to recognize the multiple conduits that exist for `moving things along'. I suggest that the disposal of discarded food is enacted via a graduated process through which it first enters a ‘gap’ where ambiguities and anxieties surrounding its residual value and onward trajectory are addressed. Working out from the gap, I discuss the shifting contours and gradients that reduce the possibilities for disposing of food through conduits in which it can be handed down, handed around or otherwise saved from wastage. Particular attention is paid to the identities and relations that are manifest in discarded food and the ways in which these prevent its re-circulation or recovery.  I also explore the overwhelming tendency for surplus food to be cast as ‘excess’ and disposed of through conduits – typically the bin – that connect it to the waste stream. Attention is paid here to the materialization and attendant stabilization of this particular trajectory. To conclude, I reflect on the practical implications of this position alongside its limitations.

David Evans is a lecturer in Sociology and a Sustainable Consumption Institute research fellow at the University of Manchester.

2011 Events

31 October 2011
'Food and Paid-Housewifery in Northern Italy'

Tiziana Traldi is an experienced researcher and a PhD candidate in the Anthropology of Material and Visual Culture at UCL. She will draw on her ethnographic fieldwork to illustrate four ways in which food is used as a medium to confirm, negotiate and challenge family roles and relationships.

25 May 2011
At Home in Contemporary Japan: Beyond the Minimal House

This special food study group event featured a guided tour by Dr Inge Daniels (Oxford University) of her exhibition at the Geffrye Museum in East London. Based on Inge’s ongoing ethnographic research, the tour focussed on photographs and objects relating to home life in contemporary Japan there was the opportunity to talk with Inge about her observations about food and eating.

6-8 April 2011
BSA Annual Conference:  60 Years of Sociology
London School of Economics, UK

1 March 2011
SCOFF seminar, Policy making within Scottish Food Culture
University of Stirling, UK

SCOFF (the Scottish Colloquium on Food & Feeding) in association with the Institute for Social Marketing  & Centre for Tobacco Control Research, University of Stirling held a lunchtime seminar considering the challenges prevailing food culture imposes on policy making . It was an opportunity for anyone interested in the cultural components of food policy to come together to share their work & interest.  

Presentations included:

• Dr Corinna Hawkes - “Exploring the culture of food policy:  the case of Scotland”
  Corinna will Reflect upon her work on the FEC project “Understanding food culture in Scotland and its comparison in an international context: implications for policy development”
• Dr Stephanie Chambers - “What do we think causes obesity, and what do we want to do about it?”
  Stephanie will talk about a cross-sectional survey project which asked about beliefs in the causes of excess weight, and  support for policy interventions.  Recognition of the cultural complexity of the topic is central to more effective future policies.

Monday, 7 February 2011
Interviews, surveys and all that jazz: Research methods for exploring children’s food practices
University of Westminster, London

• Dr Wendy Wills (University of Hertfordshire; outgoing convenor of BSA Food Study Group)
• Dr Rebecca O’Connell (Institute of Education; incoming co-convenor of BSA Food Study Group)

Researchers have noted that because food practices are embodied and embedded in social relations and social processes, they are not necessarily easily accessible to reflection. In their capacity to evoke the sensual, non-rational and material aspects of life, visual research methods offer potential for the study of food and eating. The flexible and interactive nature of some visual approaches also means that such methods may be particularly appropriate for research with children. Non-visual methods (e.g. interviews and focus groups) are also amenable to manipulation (e.g. using paired interviews and memory-work) to enable researchers to uncover the nuanced aspects of children’s everyday worlds. The fetishisation of methods and the lure of ‘innovation’ may, however, present their own challenges.

In this seminar we explored the utility and challenges associated with adopting a variety of visual and non-visual qualitative methods to study children’s food practices. Drawing on a range of literature relating to methods for making sense of everyday lives as well as examples from our own ongoing and completed research on family food practices, we provoked discussion about the appropriateness and challenges of using multiple methods in research with children and young people.

2010 Events

15 November 2010
Dr Tom MacMillan, Food Ethics Council
Tom will present findings from a study funded by NHS Health Scotland which aims at understanding food culture and its comparison in an international context (including the implications for policy development). He will talk about the approach the team took, which included a review of literature about the factors influencing eating practices and an assessment of the extent to which the cultural dimensions of food and health have been considered in recent Scottish policy.

5-6 July 2010
2nd BSA Food Study Group Conference - PROGRAMME
The British Library Conference Centre, London, UK

Abstract
Following the success of 2009's event, the aim of this 2nd conference is to further explore the interface between food, society and public health through a sociological lens.  Understanding patterns of food consumption, food acquirement or food production offers wider insights into social class, ethnicity, self-identity and the life course and the implications for national and global inequalities.

Food systems and eating practices are changing in response to the worldwide economic downturn and ever present environmental concerns, including climate change. This raises many questions, including: How are people responding? Is there a return to a ‘make do and mend’ mentality in relation to food? Are families passing on food skills and knowledge in a bid to ‘pull together’ and cope with change? Are food systems and eating practices becoming more sustainable?

What about food production and consumption in less developed countries? We are keen to explore how changing food systems are impacting on food security and livelihoods in developed and less developed countries. Is innovative action being taken to maximise the use of locally grown food, both in terms of improving sustainability and with regard to the taste/enjoyment of food?

This leaves us with the further question of whether current policies and interventions to improve diet and reduce levels of obesity remain pertinent, or do we need new solutions in a changed and changing world?

15 February 2010
Living with risk in the age of ‘intensive motherhood’: maternal identity and infant feeding
Ellie Lee, University of Kent

Abstract
Socio-cultural studies have suggested that, even in societies where it is a commonplace practice, infant feeding with formula milk can compromise women’s identity as ‘good mothers’. This proposition is explored in this paper. We first provide a brief review of literature that has considered the broad socio-cultural context for infant feeding, that of ‘intensive motherhood’. Attention is drawn to the idea that this context is one in which feeding babies formula milk is constructed as risky, for physical health but also for the mother-child relationship. Drawing on data from a study of mothers living in Great Britain, the paper then explores how mothers actually experience infant feeding with formula milk; how they live with a context that deems their actions risky. Maternal experience is found to include variously moral collapse, feelings of confidence, expressions of defiance and defensiveness, and opting to go it alone in response to ‘information overload’. Despite these variations in how mothers live with risk, the conclusion is drawn that the current cultural context does appear to be one overall in which mothers who formula feed often have to struggle hard to maintain a positive sense of themselves as mothers.

2009 Events

14 December 2009 - Food and its meaning for asylum seeking children and young people in foster care
Ravi Kohli, Helen Connelly (University of Bedfordshire) and Andrea Warman (British Association for Adoption and Fostering)

Abstract
There is little in the existing literature in refugee studies, foster care and the anthropology of food about the ways refugee and asylum seeking children regard food. This presentation reports on two projects that seek to understand how these children and their carers talk about their relationships with food after seeking sanctuary within the UK. The first is a study examining asylum seeking children’s perception of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, where they talk about food, survival, and well being as they look for asylum. The second is a project with foster carers who give accounts of the meaning of food within their households, and the strategies they use to ensure that children feel understood through food that is on offer to them. The findings suggest that food is an important marker for feelings of safety and being at ‘home’ in a new land.

11 May 2009
Gwen E Chapman, Associate Professor, Food, Nutrition & Health Program, University of British Columbia, Vancouver: Food choice processes in Canadian families: Culture, routine and reflexivity
Dr. Chapman recently completed a three year qualitative study of food choice processes in Canadian families from three ethnocultural groups in two regions of Canada: Punjabi British Columbians (PBC), African Nova Scotians (ANS), and European Canadians living in British Columbia (EBC) and Nova Scotia (ENS). In this presentation, she discussed the ways in which tradition, commonsense and reflexivity underpin participants’ everyday food practices. Despite very different histories of migration, adults in both the Punjabi British Columbian and African Nova Scotian groups tended to invoke notions of tradition and common sense understandings of well-being when explaining their food choices. In contrast, participants from the EBC group often articulated explicit discourses relating to nutritional science and/or a politics of consumption, demonstrating a high degree of reflexivity. Participants in the ENS group, despite having a similar ethnocultural background to EBC participants, displayed less engagement with these discourses. In contrast, traditional notions of ‘eating well’ appeared more prominent. These findings raise questions about the interrelated roles of culture and place in shaping food choice processes.

9 March 2009 - Jakob Klein, Lecturer in Social Anthropology, SOAS: In search of ‘quality’: food strategies in urban Southwest China
This paper discussed the attempts of households in contemporary urban Kunming, Southwest China to define and acquire ‘good quality’ foods. The discussion was set against the backdrop of an increase in the use of agrochemicals in food production, food safety scares, rising food prices, and the emergence of a Chinese market in ‘organic’, ‘green’ and other similar foodstuffs.

2008 Events

14-15 July 2008
BSA Food Study Group Conference: Food, Society and Public Health - PROGRAMME
The British Library Conference Centre, London
Confirmed keynote speakers: Claude Fischler, EHSS and CNRS, Paris and Allison James, University of Sheffield.
See Allison James' Plenary Slideshow from the Food Study Group Conference.

9 June:  Facilitated debate based on Guthman and DuPuis’s 2006 paper from Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24(3) 427 – 448 Embodying neoliberalism: economy, culture, and the politics of fat.

Friday, 30 May 2008 at 12-2pm, the Usher Room at the University of Edinburgh, Public Health Sciences, Teviot Place.  Andrea Tonner from the University of Strathclyde presented a short paper on ‘cookbook choices: a matter of self identity’.  This was followed by discussion and a general round-up of members' research activities.

2007 Events

3 December - Family Food and Convenience Consumption
Marylyn Carrigan, University of Birmingham

24 September - Domestic Kitchen Practices: Routines, Risks and Reflexivity
Lydia Martens, University of Keele

4 June 2007 - The Impacts of Nutrigenomics on Public Health
Rachel Dechenne 

3 May 2007
Size Acceptance, Dieting and Gender
A half-day seminar supported by Coventry University's Applied Research Centre in Health & Lifestyle Interventions

Programme:
12.00–1.00pm: Registration/ Lunch/ Welcome
1.00–2.00pm: Men, Dieting and the War on Obesity: Understandings from a Sociological Study, Dr Lee Monaghan, University of Limerick
2.00–2.30pm: tea/coffee
2.30-3.30pm: Male partners and their response to female desire to lose weight, Prof. Julia Buckroyd, University of Hertfordshire
3.30–4.00pm: General discussion

13 April 2007
BSA Conference - Social Connections:  Identities, Technologies, Relationships - Food Study Group Stream
University of East London, Docklands Campus, London

Programme:
0900-0930 Study Group 'Meet & Greet'
0930-1100 Food Study Group Generations and Kinship session Chair - Wendy Wills
1130-1300 Food Study Group Mundane Cultures Session: Chair - Libby Bishop
1300-1330 Food Study Group AGM.
1530-1700 Food Study Group Beliefs and Disenchantment session:Chair - TBC
1730-1830 Food Study Group Keynote Lecture: 'Youth Cultures of Eating: Intimacy, Youth and Friendship' - Prof. Elspeth Probyn, Professor of Gender & Cultural Studies, The University of Sydney. Abstract available here.

26 February 2007 - Bread:  Health and Production Aspects
Dr Bogdan Dobraszczyk, The University of Reading

26 January 2007
Obesity and Extremes:  What's the problem?
University of Edinburgh
Speakers:  Karen Throsby, University of Warwick - "Dieting like a Normal Person": Obesity, Risk and Responsibility in Accounts of Weight Loss Surgery.
Lucy Aphramor, Coventry University and 'HELP' (Cardiac Rehabilitation Programme) - Has the Energy Balance Equation had its day?  Remapping Fatness with Society in Mind.

2006 Events

British Sociological Association Annual Conference 2006
Food Study Group (SCOFF) Stream
Abstracts of the 9 papers from Harrogate are available here
Photographs from the study group's drink reception and 'meet the author' session are available by Clicking here (Powerpoint format).

London seminar and lunch series 2006 - University of Westminster.
February 2006 - Liz Dowler spoke about the work of the Food Ethics council.  You can find out more about the FEC here:  http://www.foodethicscouncil.org/

Monday, 22nd May: Dr Jane Whittle, History Dept, University of Exeter.  'The consumption of food in an early seventeenth century household' - Short report available here.

Monday, 11th September: - Food Poverty - Acting Local, Thinking National
Chaired by Lisa Wilson from Sustain's Food Poverty Project.

Monday, 18th December - Insitute of Education in conjunction with the Auto/Biography Study Group conference on 'Food and Lives'.

2005 Events

11th October 2005: Learning to cook - straightforward, necessary or really worth the effort?  Speaker:  Dr Frances Short.  University of Westminster, London.

30th June 2005: The Benefit of Experience? Food and easting in later life, University of Edinburgh

22nd March 2005: 'Food, eating and the lifecourse'
Food Study Group stream at the BSA Annual Conference, University of York.