Christine Knight

Reflections of 'Knowledge Exchange Professionals' in the Social Sciences: Emerging Opportunities and Challenges for University-Based Knowledge Brokers

Through reflections on our own experiences, this paper explores one approach to knowledge exchange that appears to be being used increasingly in social sciences in Scottish universities: the employment of dedicated “knowledge exchange professionals” or knowledge brokers. We argue that the ambiguity and hybridity of specialist knowledge exchange roles as they are emerging currently in university social science settings lead to challenges, though also opportunities, at different stages of knowledge exchange appointments. We discuss issues relating to recruitment; management and accountability; recognition and integration; professional support and development; and reward, promotion and career pathways.

Sustaining knowledge exchange and research impact in the social sciences and humanities: investing in knowledge broker roles in UK universities

Over the last decade, higher education policy in the United Kingdom (UK) has increasingly focused on the impact of academic research. This has resulted in the emergence of specialist knowledge brokers within UK universities in the social sciences and humanities. Our empirical research identified a tension between the research impact agenda and the value placed on knowledge brokerage. Based on interviews with knowledge brokers at the University of Edinburgh, we argue that funding models, short-term contracts, and posts combining knowledge brokerage with other functions result in a transient population and a squeeze on knowledge brokerage, which may limit its effectiveness in achieving research impact.

“An alliance with Mother Nature” : Natural food, health, and morality in low-carbohydrate diet books

This article examines the significance of the natural/unnatural food dichotomy in recent low-carbohydrate diet discourse, drawing on two bestselling low-carbohydrate manuals—Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution and The South Beach Diet. Low-carbohydrate diet books extend the moral associations of natural and unnatural food evident in American diet reform discourse from the nineteenth century, the key difference being the specific foods deemed natural, healthy, and virtuous. An analysis of low-carbohydrate discourse illustrates the flexibility of the descriptor “natural,” effectively being used as a proxy for acceptability across widely differing dietary plans. Atkins relies on a Rousseauian concept of nature, in which anything natural (including natural pleasure) is inherently healthy and good. By contrast, South Beach deploys a Calvinist rhetoric of austerity and self-denial. Although Atkins, in particular, criticizes the modern Western food system, hinting at its damaging effects on the environment, ultimately both manuals are concerned primarily with individual health.

“We Can’t Go Back a Hundred Million Years”

Abstract Low-carbohydrate diets such as the Atkins Diet were especially popular in English-speaking developed countries in the 1990s and 2000s. The popular low-carbohydrate literature displays a strong discourse of “nutritional primitivism”: that is, pursuit of supposedly simpler, more natural and authentic ways of eating, as part of a quest for health. Nutritional primitivism includes evolutionary explanations for obesity and type 2 diabetes and arguments based on nutritional anthropology. This paper explores low-carbohydrate dieters’ responses to nutritional primitivism, based on an interview study late in the low-carbohydrate trend. Although some interviewees accepted nutritional primitivism unproblematically, most approached such ideas critically and skeptically—cause for cautious celebration given the problems of logic, evidence and (on occasion) racism in the primitivist discourse of the low-carbohydrate literature.

Indigenous nutrition research and the low-carbohydrate diet movement: Explaining obesity and diabetes in Protein Power

Low-carbohydrate diets were particularly popular in English-speaking Western countries in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Based on a critical analysis of the bestselling low-carbohydrate diet book Protein Power (Eades and Eades 1996), this paper examines and critiques the use of anthropological and nutritional research about Indigenous people in the low-carbohydrate diet movement. I argue that Protein Power turns the popular scientific gaze onto Indigenous groups as a purported explanatory microcosm for the West, in which the negative effects of ‘civilized’ diet and lifestyle appear magnified and accelerated. However, the reduction of Indigenous foodways to the binary formation ‘urbanized Western diet’ versus ‘traditional Indigenous diet’ cannot account for the cultural and historical context in which food practices take place, nor for the social and environmental factors implicated in the development of diabetes and obesity. Rather, this binary reflects an investment in the ideology of ‘nutritional primitivism’: pursuit of a more natural and authentic, and therefore ostensibly healthier, diet.

Negative stereotypes of the Scottish diet: A qualitative analysis of deep-fried Mars bar references in bestselling newspapers in Scotland, 2011-14.

The Scottish diet is associated in the UK media and popular discourse with unhealthy deep-fried foods. In addition to the stereotypes negative effects on perceptions of Scottish food, culture and people, there is evidence that the stereotype of the Scottish diet has negative effects on food behaviour and public health in Scotland, having been shown to encourage consumption of deep-fried foods and discourage positive dietary change. The most notorious deep-fried food associated with Scotland is the deep-fried Mars bar (DFMB), arguably invented in Stonehaven (near Aberdeen), and first reported in the Scottish and UK press in 1995. This article reports findings from an analysis of newspaper references to the DFMB in the two highest selling newspapers in Scotland, the Scottish Sun and the Daily Record, between 2011 and 2014. A keyword search (“deep fried Mars bar”) using the online media database Lexis Library generated 97 unique records, and the resulting dataset was analysed thematically and discursively. Analysis showed that both newspapers clearly associated the DFMB with Scotland. Further, both newspapers portrayed the DFMB and the broader “deep-fried” Scottish diet stereotype ambivalently (mixed positive and negative associations). However, the Daily Record actively criticised the DFMB stereotype much more often than did the Scottish Sun. These findings suggest that the Scottish population encounters different messages in the press about food and nutrition from people elsewhere in the UK, and that these messages vary depending on choice of media in Scotland. Given the known negative effects of the stereotype, differences in Scottish media discourse should be considered a potential factor in persistent health inequalities affecting Scotland. Educational efforts, and opening discussion with journalists and amongst the Scottish public, may be helpful.

Analytic Outreach for Intelligence: Insights from a Workshop on Emerging Biotechnology Threats

This article describes a new effort to engage in analytic outreach between academic scholars and intelligence analysts on the issue of emerging biotechnology threats to US national security. The context of this outreach was a September 2012 meeting in London to explore possibilities for enhanced analytic outreach in relation to emerging biotechnology threats, supported by the UK Genomics Policy and Research Forum. This meeting consisted of a mix of current and former intelligence practitioners and policy officials, and social science and scientific experts, from both the UK and the US. As will be described below, this unique pairing of experts and subjects revealed new insights into how to improve intelligence assessments on biotechnology and bioweapons threats. It also revealed continuing challenges in reforming assessments within existing intelligence work routines.

Selling the “Inca superfood”: nutritional primitivism in superfoods books and maca marketing

ABSTRACT The trend for novel and exotic “superfoods” exemplifies the contemporary tendency to idealize “primitive” food cultures as nutritional utopias. Based on critical textual and visual analysis of superfoods books and packaging, this article shows that “nutritional primitivism” has blossomed in superfoods discourse and marketing since the 1980s, evolving into a knowledge framework for evaluating a food’s healthfulness that challenges nutrition science. It demonstrates that nutritional primitivism emerges not only in response to a perceived crisis in Western health, but also social and environmental concerns about globalized and industrialized agri-food systems. However, primitivist representations of superfoods essentialize producers and production practices as traditional and timeless, obscuring their complex and changing reality. While nutritional primitivism can be understood as a popular critique of contemporary food systems and their underlying social structures, these incipient critiques thus fall short on key issues of food sovereignty.