Toward an Affective Political Ecology of Obesity

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 346-366
Author(s):  
Emma-Jayne Abbots ◽  
Karin Eli ◽  
Stanley Ulijaszek

This article argues for an affective approach to obesity that destabilizes the conceptual boundaries between the biological and the social aspects of food, eating, and fatness. Its approach foregrounds visceral experience, attends to food both inside and outside the body, and explores how bodies labeled “obese” consume their political, economic, and material environments. This approach is termed affective political ecology. The authors’ aim is to draw attention to how the entanglements between the physiological and social aspects of eating tend to be absented from antiobesity public health rhetoric. By exploring a range of ethnographic examples in high-income countries, they illuminate how such interventions often fail to account for the complex interplays between subjective corporeal experience and political economic relations and contend that overlooking an individual’s visceral relationship with food counterproductively augments social stigma, stresses, and painful emotions. They demonstrate, then, how an approach that draws together political economic and biomedical perspectives better reflects the lived experience of eating. In so doing, the authors aim to indicate how attending to affective political ecologies can further our understanding of the consumption practices of those in precarious and stressful social contexts, and they offer additional insight into how the entanglement of the biological and the social is experienced in everyday life.

2021 ◽  
pp. 003022282110265
Author(s):  
Dorothy M. Goulah-Pabst

The complicated grief experienced by suicide loss survivors leads to feelings of abandonment, rejection, intense self-blame, and depression. Stigma surrounding suicide further burdens survivors who can experience rejection by their community and social networks. Research in the field of psychology has delved into the grieving process of suicide loss survivors, however the effects of suicide require more sociological study to fully understand and support the impact of the suicidal bereavement process on the social interactions and relationships of those left behind after death. This study aims to contribute to the body of research exploring the social challenges faced after the suicide of a loved one. Based on the analysis of powerful personal narratives through qualitative interviews shared by 14 suicide loss survivors this study explores the social construction of the grieving and healing process for suicide loss survivors. Recognizing that the most reliable relief is in commiseration with like experienced people, this research points to the support group as a builder of social solidarity. The alienation caused by the shame and stigma of suicide loss can be reversed by the feelings of attachment to the group that listens, understands and accepts. Groups created by and for suicide loss survivors should be considered a necessary tool to be used toward healing those who suffer from loss by suicide.


Author(s):  
Marco Briziarelli

Through the lens of a political economic approach, I consider the question whether or not social media can promote social change. I claim that whereas media have consistently channeled technological utopia/dystopia, thus be constantly linked to aspirations and fear of social change, the answer to that question does not depend on their specific nature but on historically specific social relations in which media operate. In the case here considered, it requires examining the social relations re-producing and produced by informational capitalism. More specifically, I examine how the productive relations that support user generated content practices of Facebook users affect social media in their capability to reproduce and transform existing social contexts. Drawing on Fuchs and Sevignani's (2013) distinction between “work” and “labor” I claim that social media reflect the ambivalent nature of current capitalist mode of production: a contest in which exploitative/emancipatory as well as reproductive/transformative aspects are articulated by liberal ideology.


2021 ◽  
pp. 65-80
Author(s):  
Sandro Galea

This chapter examines the foundational forces that shape health. Even without a pandemic, the United States is faced with public health threats that are shaped by foundational forces. From the political and economic roots of the obesity epidemic, to the social stigma that informs the opioid crisis, to the many structural drivers of climate change, the social, economic, political, and demographic foundations of health are central to the challenges that must be addressed, nationally and globally, in the years to come. Engaging with these forces helped inform the response to COVID-19; they can help in addressing these other challenges as well. And just as a virus can have long-term effects on the body, the pandemic reshaped the societal foundations, with lasting implications for the economy, culture, attitudes towards core issues like race, politics, and more. Whether the experience of the pandemic leads to significant long-term benefits will depend on whether Americans retain the hard lessons of that moment and apply them to foundational forces.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 122
Author(s):  
Chennault ◽  
Klavitter ◽  
Sutton

Through a praxis of co-authorship between a university scholar and two community gardeners/organizers/activists, this article showcases the ways in which knowledge, practices, and relationalities emergent in community gardens in Dubuque, Iowa USA directly engage with the politics of food, land, and housing. The authors engage in co-authorship across university and community boundaries to ontologically reframe knowledge production and draw critical attention to the everyday livelihoods and political ecologies experienced within marginalized communities. We use extended conversations and interviews to analyze the food, land, and housing issues that emerge in the context of uneven racial relations and neighborhood revitalization. We then organize our analysis using a Political Ecology of the Body (PEB) framework to consider how people’s bodily, emotional, and social lives impact their relationalities with food, gardening, and neighborhood spaces. Our findings show that community gardening efforts are transforming the Washington and North End neighborhoods—even if these changes appear to outsiders to be small-scale or difficult to measure—while also calling attention to the anti-oppression and anti-racism work that remains to be done. Our co-authorship demonstrates how community gardeners and university partners can work together to contest histories of marginalization and foster more socially just relations.


2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (6) ◽  
pp. 791-805 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsty M. Patterson ◽  
Chris Clarke ◽  
Emma L. Wolverson ◽  
Esme D. Moniz-Cook

ABSTRACTBackground:Psychosocial models suggest that the lived experience of dementia is affected by interpersonal factors such as the ways in which others view, talk about, and behave toward the person with dementia. This review aimed to illuminate how informal, everyday interpersonal relationships are experienced by people with dementia within their social contexts.Method:A systematic review of qualitative literature published between 1989 and May 2016 was conducted, utilizing the electronic databases PsycINFO, MEDLINE, and CINAHL-Complete. This was followed by a critical interpretative synthesis to understand how people with dementia perceive the attitudes, views, and reactions of other people toward them, and the subjective impact that these have.Results:Four major themes were derived from the findings of the 23 included studies: being treated as an “other” rather than “one of us”; being treated as “lesser” rather than a full, valued member of society; the impact of others’ responses; and strategies to manage the responses of others. Thus, people with dementia can feel outcast and relegated, or indeed feel included and valued by others. These experiences impact upon emotional and psychological well-being, and are actively interpreted and managed by people with dementia.Conclusion:Experiences such as loss and diminishing identity have previously been understood as a direct result of dementia, with little consideration of interpersonal influences. This review notes that people with dementia actively engage with others, whose responses can foster or undermine social well-being. This dynamic relational aspect may contribute to emerging understandings of social health in dementia.


1998 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pippa Brush

The metaphor of inscription on the body and the constitution of the body through those inscriptions have been widely used in recent attempts to theorize the body. Michel Foucault calls the body the ‘inscribed surface of events’ (Foucault, 1984: 83) and Elizabeth Grosz argues that the ‘female (or male) body can no longer be regarded as a fixed, concrete substance, a pre-cultural given. It has a determinate form only by being socially inscribed’ (Grosz, 1987: 2). The body becomes plastic, inscribed with gender and cultural standards. While Foucault assumes the existence of a pre-inscriptive body, many theorists reject that idea and argue that ‘there is no recourse to a body that has not always already been interpreted by cultural meanings’ (Butler, 1990: 8). The constitution of the body rests in its inscription; the body becomes the text which is written upon it and from which it is indistinguishable. Starting from Catherine Belsey's suggestion that to ‘give the metaphor literal significance … is to … isolate it for contemplation’ (Belsey, 1988: 100), I discuss this metaphor of inscription, using cosmetic surgery as one literal example. While some theorists reject the pre-inscriptive body, the popular discourses advocating changing one's body assume unproblematically the existence of a body prior to these ‘elective’ procedures and reinforce the mind/body dualism which recent theory has sought so insistently to reject. I examine how popular discourses of body modification enforce a disciplinary regime (in Foucault's sense) and impose degrees of both literal and figurative inscription. Juxtaposing these two perspectives, I explore how both discourses efface the materiality of the body and the social contexts within which bodies are experienced and constructed. While the rhetoric surrounding cosmetic surgery denies the physical process and the economic constraints, so theories of the body which stress the body's plasticity also deny the materiality of that process and the cultural and social contexts within which the body is always placed.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Callan Sait

<p>Following calls from both disability studies and anthropology to provide ethnographic accounts of disability, this thesis presents the narratives of nine people living with disability, focusing on what disability means to them, how it is incorporated into their identities, and how it shapes their lived experiences. While accounts of disability from disability studies often focus on the social model of disability (Shakespeare 2006) and emphasise social stigma and oppression (Goffman 1967, Susman 1994), anthropological accounts often emphasise the suffering and search for cures (Rapp and Ginsburg 2012) that is assumed to accompany disability. Both approaches have their benefits, but neither pay particularly close attention to the personal experiences of individuals, on their own terms.  By taking elements from both disciplines, this thesis aims to present a balanced view that emphasises the lived experiences of individuals with disability, and uses these experiences as a starting point for wider social analysis. The primary focus of this thesis is understanding how disability shapes an individual’s identity: what physical, emotional, and social factors influence how these people are perceived – by themselves and others? Through my participants’ narratives I explore how understandings of normal bodies and normal lives influence their sense of personhood, and investigate the role of stigma in mediating social encounters and self-concepts. Furthermore, I undertake a novel study of the role of technology in the lives of people living with disability. My work explores how both assistive and non-assistive (‘general’) technologies are perceived and utilised by my participants in ways that effect not just the physical experience of disability, but also social perceptions and personal understandings of the body/self.  I argue that although the social model of disability is an excellent analytical tool, and one which has provided tangible benefits for disabled people, its political nature can sometimes lead to a homogenisation of disabled experiences; something which this thesis is intended to remedy by providing ethnographic narratives of disability, grounded in the embodied experiences of individuals.</p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabella Lamas ◽  
Stefania Barca ◽  
Bernadete Souza Ferreira ◽  
Ivonne Yanez

Abstract Decolonial political ecology embodies far more than mere critique. Rather, decolonial political ecologies allow us to advance transformative proposals, to articulate sophisticated reflections on emancipatory practices, and, above all, to re-imagine future scenarios and horizons. These imagined horizons were articulated by three women from different social contexts: Bernadete Souza Ferreira Santos, a ialorixá peasant and specialist in Rural Education and Agroecology from USP, who works as a ‘popular educator’ in the region of Ilhéus (southern Bahia); Ivonne Yanez, an environmental activist from Ecuador and one of the founders of the organization Acción Ecologica; and Stefania Barca, a scholar in feminist political ecology, originally from Naples (Italy), and currently working at the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra (Portugal). Together, they show us the paths towards emancipatory horizons that can be found at the intersection between Political Ecology and feminism.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Callan Sait

<p>Following calls from both disability studies and anthropology to provide ethnographic accounts of disability, this thesis presents the narratives of nine people living with disability, focusing on what disability means to them, how it is incorporated into their identities, and how it shapes their lived experiences. While accounts of disability from disability studies often focus on the social model of disability (Shakespeare 2006) and emphasise social stigma and oppression (Goffman 1967, Susman 1994), anthropological accounts often emphasise the suffering and search for cures (Rapp and Ginsburg 2012) that is assumed to accompany disability. Both approaches have their benefits, but neither pay particularly close attention to the personal experiences of individuals, on their own terms.  By taking elements from both disciplines, this thesis aims to present a balanced view that emphasises the lived experiences of individuals with disability, and uses these experiences as a starting point for wider social analysis. The primary focus of this thesis is understanding how disability shapes an individual’s identity: what physical, emotional, and social factors influence how these people are perceived – by themselves and others? Through my participants’ narratives I explore how understandings of normal bodies and normal lives influence their sense of personhood, and investigate the role of stigma in mediating social encounters and self-concepts. Furthermore, I undertake a novel study of the role of technology in the lives of people living with disability. My work explores how both assistive and non-assistive (‘general’) technologies are perceived and utilised by my participants in ways that effect not just the physical experience of disability, but also social perceptions and personal understandings of the body/self.  I argue that although the social model of disability is an excellent analytical tool, and one which has provided tangible benefits for disabled people, its political nature can sometimes lead to a homogenisation of disabled experiences; something which this thesis is intended to remedy by providing ethnographic narratives of disability, grounded in the embodied experiences of individuals.</p>


2003 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Genevieve Fisher ◽  
Diana DiPaolo Loren

This article provides a brief overview of recent archaeological literature about bodily constructions of identity. We introduce themes of embodiment, landscape, appearance, representation, and symbolism and discuss how presentations of the body are used to construct identities in social contexts. By focusing on the ways in which individuals create and experience themselves through their bodies, archaeologists are better able to comprehend them as culturally-specific, multiply-constituted social beings. The presentation of self can then be used to interpret the social and physical aspects (gender, race, religion, sexuality, age, etc.) that are key to the construction of identities in everyday life.


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