Feeding the Hungry Other: Levinas, Breastfeeding, and the Politics of Hunger

Hypatia ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-274 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robyn Lee
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Health Promotion ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ethical Responsibility ◽  
Moral Concern ◽  
Ethical Obligation ◽  
Breastfeeding Promotion ◽  
Quality Food ◽  
Public Health Promotion

Breastfeeding has become a subject of moral concern as its benefits have become well known. Encouraging mothers to breastfeed has been the goal of extensive public health promotion efforts. Emmanuel Levinas makes absolute responsibility to the Other central to his ethics, with giving food to the Other the paradigmatic ethical act. However, Levinas also provides an important critique of the autonomous individual who is taken for granted by breastfeeding promotion efforts. I argue that the ethical obligation to feed the hungry child must be recognized as coextensive with meeting the needs of women, especially given the current absence of important social and economic supports for breastfeeding. Under a Levinasian framework, each of us is ethically responsible for feeding children; this responsibility is not limited to mothers. This ethical responsibility needs to be expressed through improving social and economic supports necessary for those individuals who wish to breastfeed, instead of attempting to convince women to breastfeed. This ethical responsibility must also be understood in a broader context of a politics of hunger, which provides access to quality food for all, and goes beyond mere nutrition to include the importance of culture, touch, and intimacy in the enjoyment of food—what Levinas calls “good soup.”

Can We Learn to Hear Ethical Calls? In Honor of Scott Cameron

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-42
Author(s):  
Christina M. Gschwandtner ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ethical Responsibility ◽  
Ethical Obligation ◽  
Ethical Response

This article tries to grapple with the difficulty of hearing the call of the other and recognizing it as a call that obligates us to ethical response, especially when such a “call” is not issued by a human other but by other species or environmental precarity more broadly. I briefly review how ethical responsibility is articulated by Emmanuel Lévinas and then consider some of the ways in which his philosophy has been applied to environmental questions. I suggest that while some calls might be obvious and obligate by the blatant need almost impossible to ignore, in many cases a hermeneutic context and predisposition is required in order to “hear” a call and understand it as ethically obligating. I conclude with one example of how it might be possible to inculcate such dispositions that would attune us to more careful hearing and might cause us to recognize ethical obligation.

The Experience in Organizing and Conducting the Analysis of Data on Nutrition of School-Aged Children in the Sverdlovsk Region within the Federal Public Health Promotion Project

2020 ◽  
pp. 10-17
Author(s):  
NA Moiseeva ◽  
IL Kholstinina ◽  
MF Knyazeva ◽  
TV Mazhaeva ◽  
OL Malykh ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Health Promotion ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Nutritional Value ◽  
School Meals ◽  
School Aged Children ◽  
Healthy Nutrition ◽  
Urban And Rural Areas ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Public Health Promotion

Introduction: Implementation of the Federal Public Health Promotion Project should raise awareness and develop skills of healthy nutrition in children, thus contributing to disease prevention. Our objective was to evaluate the results of pilot nutrition monitoring in school-aged children of the Sverdlovsk Region as part of the Federal Public Health Promotion Project and the National Demography Project. Results: We established that school meals were generally satisfactory: the rations complied with physiological needs of children in terms of their nutritional value, basic nutrients, energy, and distribution of calories by main meals. We noted differences in the cost and nutritional value of meals and the variety of dishes and foodstuffs used between urban and rural areas. As a rule, pupils have one or two school meals a day. Outside of school, their consumption of dairy products and fruit is limited. Conclusions: Our findings may promote the elaboration of municipal programs aimed, inter alia, at changing the amount of sugar and salt used in the manufacture of public catering products, the cost of dishes with a high content of sugar, saturated fats, and salt, and subsidies on healthy nutrition.

Promoting Maternal Visions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miranda R. Waggoner
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Health Promotion ◽  
Social Control ◽  
Disease Control ◽  
Care Model ◽  
Pregnancy Care ◽  
Stratified Reproduction ◽  
The Social ◽  
Control And Prevention ◽  
Public Health Promotion

This chapter examines how the pre-pregnancy care model has influenced public health promotion, illustrated through the “Show Your Love” campaign that was created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2013. This chapter reveals how the campaign’s message drew on and promoted gendered and racialized tropes in its goal of promoting pre-maternal love for future babies and, in so doing, further stratified reproduction. Discussion in this chapter highlights the social control aspects of public health and how the power of this particular messaging potentially reframes practices of “intensive mothering” into an ethic of “anticipatory motherhood.”

Critical studies of the politics of public health promotion

2018 ◽  
pp. 13-32
Author(s):  
Peter Triantafillou ◽  
Naja Vucina
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Health Promotion ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
Analyse Power ◽  
Critical Social Science ◽  
Public Health Promotion

The chapter provides an overview of existing critical social science studies of health promotion and outlines the analytical framework used in the remainder of the book. First, we review and discuss the merits and the limitations of the most influential political science, political economy, and sociological analyses, seeking to critically address contemporary politics of health. Second, we account for the Foucauldian-inspired analytical framework used in the empirical analyses. This implies accounting for the ways in which we adopt key analytical principles and concepts from Foucault’s work in order to analyse power-knowledge relations and unquestioned norms in the contemporary politics of health.

Critical success factors of public health sponsorship in Australia

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-49
Author(s):  
Billy Sung ◽  
Ian Phau ◽  
Isaac Cheah ◽  
Kevin Teah
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Health Promotion ◽  
Critical Success Factors ◽  
Success Factors ◽  
Environmental Changes ◽  
Behavioural Change ◽  
Health Messages ◽  
Australian Health ◽  
Critical Success ◽  
Public Health Promotion

Abstract Public health sponsorship is a unique phenomenon in Australia. The current research examines the critical success factors of Western Australian Health Promotion Foundation’s (Healthway) sponsorship program, Australia’s largest public health sponsorship program. Using stakeholder interviews and expert observational studies, two studies present five key success factors: (i) effective segmentation and targeting of health messages; (ii) collaboration between Healthway and partnering organization to leverage sponsored events; (iii) displacement of unhealth sponsorship; (iv) use of leveraging strategies to raise awareness of health messages; and (v) environmental changes that facilitate behavioural change. The current research provides insights into how and why sponsorship is an effective public health promotion tool.

Promoting Safer Foods in Latin America and the Caribbean

1988 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 375-382
Author(s):  
Marilyn Rice ◽  
Fernando Quevedo
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Health Promotion ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Media Communication ◽  
Current Trends ◽  
Health Promotion And Education ◽  
Tourism Sector ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Public Health Promotion ◽  
Looking Back

This article describes the current trends in public health promotion and education in Latin America and the Caribbean. It gives examples of approaches that work and highlights some of the difficulties of concentrating strictly on the use of mass media communication. Various programs and projects for promoting the safe handling of foods are cited from specific countries and subregions in the Americas. Looking back on what has worked and what has failed, the authors recognize that some advancements have been achieved in improving the public's handling and protection of food, particularly in the tourism sector, and yet many challenges lie ahead for improving upon what has already been done.

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