Manchester BSA Congress Presentation: How and why should children eat healthy?

Is eating healthy that black & white as nutrition and policy guidelines usually claim it to be? Michalis Kontopodis’s presentation “How and why should children eat healthy? Ethnographic snapshots into diverse children’s everyday eating practices” draws on materials from his long-term ethnographic and participatory research on everyday eating practices in a variety of settings in Europe and Latin America, such as wealthy preschools, alternative urban allotment gardens, grassroots countryside movements and indigenous communities. By paying close attention to the differences in how and why children eat fruit and vegetables in these settings, Dr Kontopodis will explore how distinct knowledge practices bring together “adults”, “children” and “things” in a variety of material-semiotic entanglements over multiple temporal layers. While biomedical and psycho-pedagogical concerns intermingle with ecological as well as broader societal issues, understandings of the “individual” and the “population” may shift not only from one setting to another but even within the same setting. Such entanglements may entail “healthy” or “diverse” children’s bodies, “individual” habits or preferences, “fresh” fruit, “fancy” cups, “expensive” freezers or “free-range chickens” as well as “public health” guidelines and “agro-ecological” values. How is “childhood” re-configured in this frame? This presentation is part of the special event: “Socio-Material & Posthuman Configurations in Child & Youth Studies: Moving In-Between the Personal & the Collective” (coordinated by M. Kontopodis) taking place at the British Sociological Association Annual Conference, Manchester: 4–6 April 2017. Conference programme: HERE.

Further details & readings: https://mkontopodis.wordpress.com/biopedagogies/