Vectors and Intersections
Food Messages from School to Home: Missed Opportunities and Good Pathways
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session JaneMaree Maher, Sian Supski
Contemporary responses to childhood obesity rates in countries of the Global North have seen an increasing emphasis on embedding healthy food pedagogies in primary school curriculums. This approach is in part designed on assumptions that children are open to learning healthy habits and that they can have an important role as advocates for health in families. In this study with 50 families in Victoria Australia, with primary school-aged children (between six and twelve years of age), we used a mixed methods approach (including interviews, photos and videos created by the children) to understand what messages children are hearing at school about healthy eating and how these messages translated to their family context and eating. Our findings suggest that generally school food messages remain muddled and are not readily taken up by children. On the other hand, parents are influenced by, and interacting with, discourses of healthy eating and bad food that circulate. We conclude by looking at a number of school/family interactions where communication and engagement about healthy food appear to be operating effectively for children.
Reinventing Oneself through Food: A Study of the Raw Food Movement
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Solenn Thircuir
The raw food ideology is based on an ideal of health, a social demand that of a humanity relieved of suffering and disease. Its ambition is to make the individuals become "more alive." This commitment is therefore based on the conviction and the faith in the power of the living to establish a just order. The emergence of raw foodism, claiming to hold a "truth" hidden by other approaches, is based on a dynamic of disenchantment/reenchantment of the world. The approach envisages individual awareness as a vector of societal change integrating values relating to the body, the environment, education, spirituality or politics, joins a generalized tendency which considers that a global change must first come from the individual. This is because the purification of personal lifestyle is associated with the solution to social problems. This food practice reveals an initiative of self transformation. In France, this diet is becoming increasingly popular. This article aims to understand, with a sociological approach, from the individual stories of french raw foodists, how experimenting with a new way of eating makes possible other ways of living one's environment and body. I will draw attention to the interviewees’ perception of their food choice and to the way they describe their commitment. The analysis of the interviews conducted during this thesis shows how common the vibrations are between the individual and the collective problems at the level of society.
Growing Food, Growing Youth: Place-based Education as Social Justice
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Eunice Leung Brekke
Located on the Wai‘anae Coast of O‘ahu, MA'O Organic Farms is one of Hawaii’s largest independent farms with a social mission to not only create a sustainable Hawai’i but to also grow its youth. MA'O is an acronym for mala ‘ai 'opio meaning the youth food garden or growing youth. The youth, many who are Native Hawaiian and first generation college students, are participants in the farm’s Youth Leadership Training program. The program is an indigenous, place-based program where in addition to working at the farm, the youth attend college. Native Hawaiian youth have not traditionally been served well by Hawai‘i’s public school system. Youth experience a number of challenges including negotiating highly negative stereotypes about Hawaiians and public schools largely characterized by low expectations and graduates who either do not attend or are academically unprepared for higher education. Through MA'O, the importance of valuing the indigenous culture, particularly, Hawaiian values and the connection to land and ancestry is emphasized. The youth identify with Hawaiian values and practices of place and caring for the land, specifically aloha ‘aina and malama ‘aina. Youth develop a strong sense of place and commitment to their community, and consequently a shift of how they view their identity and future. From negative stereotypes to a sense of responsibility and purpose – youth see their roles as change agents in creating a sustainable future for their community and for Hawai‘i.
Representations of Family Meals and Family Communication in Samsung’s ‘Bixby’ Advertising Campaign
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session William James Taylor
This paper addresses representations of family communication in Samsung’s advertising campaign for the voice activated digital assistant “Bixby”. As a guiding slogan, Samsung claims to “make things that bring families together.” In the commercial “This is Family,” Bixby is featured as a mediating device in communicative acts surrounding a family dinner. As such, the Bixby campaign intersects with the growing push for “device free dinners” as a means to promote greater family communication and satisfaction. However, this paper argues that such representations promote a vision of family meals and family communication that is both romanticized and gendered. All of the families are large, happy and enjoying an abundance of freshly prepared foods. This contrasts starkly with the reality of non-traditional families, busy schedules, work, processed foods and the absence of available fresh foods. These families represent nuclear families, which promotes an outdated conception of the family that excludes single-parent and LGBTQ+ familial arrangements from those romanticized visions. Understanding the call for greater family meals and communication in the context of growing digital media mediation illuminates how food activities, intended to represent togetherness, can instead foster exclusionary visions of social relationships.
