Allison Hayes-Conroy

Taking back taste: feminism, food and visceral politics

Despite much thoughtful agro-food scholarship, the politics of food lacks adequate appreciation because scholars have not developed a means to specify the links between the materialities of food and ideologies of food and eating. This article uses feminist theory to enliven a discussion of what the authors call visceral politics, and thus initiates a project of illustrating the mechanisms through which peoples beliefs about food connect with their everyday experiences of food. Recent work on governed eating and material geographies is brought together with poststructural feminism in order to move towards a non-dualistic, visceral understanding of (everyday) socio-political life. In showing how the mind–body whole can be conceived as a singular, albeit ambiguously-unified agent, the article prefigures a more complete disclosure of the play of power in food systems. Food is shown as a means to trace power through the body in order to understand the making of the political (eating) subject. Specifically, reconceptualizing taste and the ‘Slow Food’ (SF) movement of taste education helps to concretize what a visceral politics of food might look like. The authors conclude that appreciating how food beliefs and representations exist materially in the body is crucial to the ability of food-based movements to inspire action across difference and achieve their progressive goals.

Visceral difference: variations in feeling (slow) food

This paper responds to concerns over a lack of diversity in alternative food movements by entertaining the possibility of understanding difference as a visceral process—a process of bodily feeling/sensation. Participatory research within and around the Slow Food (SF) movement reveals the complex role of feelings in motivating food actions and activism. On the whole, the cocreated data from this research illustrate that food is never ingested by itself: in the body, molecular connections develop between food and a countless array of other factors. Thus, food and food movements come to feel differently in different bodies as a result of inner-connected biological and social forces. In paying attention to such biosocial processes alternative food movements like SF may develop new under-standings as to why they activate some people to participate in alternative food practices while chilling others. Accordingly the paper suggests that attentiveness to visceral feeling could enhance the ability of food movements to mobilize across difference.

Biology, Social Environment, and Personalized Medicine

These advances in the physical and biological sciences provided much needed explanations for how the body functioned in health and disease. Leading scientists such as Claude Bernard developed the concept of internal physiological balance, later named homeostasis by Walter Cannon [2, 3] . Edward Jenner introduced the method of vaccination, and Joseph Lister demonstrated the value of antisepsis [4, 5] . It was not long before those discoveries and others (e.g., Landsteiner’s system of blood compatibility, Banting and insulin for diabetes) fundamentally strengthened the benefit of treatment for individual patients. Advances in the social sciences were notable too. Progress in social theory by Comte and Spencer argued for the importance of understanding social phenomena in health and disease. Advances were also made in psychology by Dewey (educational theory), by Watson (behavioral conditioning) and by those who contributed to the rise of the cognitive sciences. Ironically none of these advances in social or behavioral science were integrated into clinical medicine or materially affected the care of the individual patient by physicians educated largely in the biological sciences. Leading scientists in the 19th century came to believe in the biological causes of disease and the “one agent, one disVariability is the law of life and as no two faces are the same, so no two bodies are alike and no two individuals react alike and behave alike under the abnormal conditions which we know as disease. Sir William Osler [1]

Understanding Cultural Acceptability for Urban Food Policy

The notion of cultural acceptability is often called forth as a necessary component of food security, yet there is a lack of guidance in literature and policy as to how to operationalize this concept. Without specifying what cultural acceptability means, the concept risks becoming watered down, discounted, or obsolete in practice. This review strives to speak to those gaps by cataloging the connotations and implications of cultural acceptability in literature on urban food policy, food security, and associated topics. We explore the ways in which cultural acceptability has been invoked explicitly and implicitly in policy, planning, and scholarly literatures on food security in recent years in order to better understand what cultural acceptability has come to mean, how it is being utilized, and how it can be operationalized toward more flexible and appropriate urban food policy. We discuss ways in which cultural acceptability encapsulates more than certain types of food and literature that might provide dimension to the meaning and operationalization of cultural acceptability of food. Drawing on scholars that are breaking open understandings of cultural acceptability, we call attention to its complexity with reference to human rights-based approaches, cultural values evident in production and consumption processes, the importance of interweaving multiple knowledges, and challenging decision-making powers in today’s corporate food regime. Cultural valuations within these broad and fluid topics can provide important improvements to policy approaches to the cultural acceptability of food and are important for creating food security policy that is effective for meeting the needs of diverse populations.

The fluidity of biosocial identity and the effects of place, space, and time

Public and scientific conceptions of identity are changing alongside advances in biotechnology, with important relevance to health and medicine. In particular, biological identity, once predominantly conceived as static (e.g., related to DNA, dental records, fingerprints) is now being recognized as dynamic or fluid, mirroring contemporary understandings of psychological and social identity. The dynamism of biological identity comes from the individual bodys unique relationship with the world surrounding it, and therefore may best be described as biosocial. This paper reviews advances in scientific understandings of identity and presents a model that contrasts prior static approaches to biological identity from more recent dynamically-relational ones. This emerging viewpoint is of broad significance to health and medicine, particularly as medicine recognizes the significance of biography - i.e. the multiple, dense interactions imparted on a body across spatio-temporal dimensions - to phenotypic prediction, especially disease risk.

Peace building with the body: resonance and reflexivity in Colombia’s Legion del Afecto

ABSTRACT Youth in Medellín, Colombia have been recognized as potential peacebuilders through initiatives for urban peace and non-violence, including the initiative Legión del Afecto. This paper explores the development of the Legión del Afecto in order to ask questions about the peace building potential of specific frames (e.g. coexistence) and specific strategies of mobilization (e.g. embodied). We describe how differences between the earlier and later years of the Legión have come to highlight tensions between affective versus market-based relationships in motivating youth. These tensions may be productive, but without serious attention to reflexivity, may also derail peacebuilding efforts.

The whole lupus: Articulating biosocial interplay in systemic lupus erythematosus epidemiology and population disparities

Abstract Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), commonly known simply as lupus, is an autoimmune disease in which the bodys immune system attacks healthy tissue and organs. Characteristic of the disease is a disproportionate effect on women and communities of color, both in terms of prevalence and severity of symptoms. Lupus is also both genetically driven and subject to external environmental conditions, many with place based corollaries. Thus, lupus presents a series of complex and intersecting biosocial questions regarding its origin and treatment, questions which transdisciplinary approaches are uniquely suited to address. In this paper, we propose a framework, incorporating critical approaches to the production of embodied formations of race and gender as well as new understandings of the impact of environmental conditions and lived experience at the genetic level, that can direct future research into lupus that is both more inclusive of a range of influences and more precise in its ability to treat and diagnose the disease. HighlightsSystemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) characterized by uneven prevalence and outcomes.SLE is the result of complex interactions between biological and social factors.Social categories may “become biological” in SLE disparities.A holistic model of SLE can provide richer data and lead to novel interventions.

Somatic Sovereignty: Body as Territory in Colombia's Legión del Afecto

Responding to decades of conflict in Colombia, a social initiative known as the Legión del Afecto began in Medellín as a peacebuilding effort among academics, community leaders, and young activists. Attention to the body, particularly bodily feelings, sensations, and emotions, has been central to the peacebuilding methodology of the Legión. The initiative has used a focus on the body not only to produce alternative practices of territory that help keep people alive but also (and therein) to materialize the possibility of feeling differently within targeted spaces. What ultimately drives collective action in the Legión is the possibility for increased autonomy over spatial structures of feeling. The ways in which body and territory have been merged in the initiative echo wider trends regarding territory as a theme in Latin American social movements.