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Dive into the research topics where Tanya Zivkovic is active.

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Featured researches published by Tanya Zivkovic.


Journal of Sociology | 2010

In the name of the child The gendered politics of childhood obesity

Tanya Zivkovic; Megan Warin; Michael J. Davies; Vivienne M. Moore

This paper investigates the ways in which ‘the child’ is positioned in obesity debates and, in doing so, examines the discursive relations between childhood obesity, mothering and child neglect. Using legal cases of parental neglect and an analysis of representations of obesity in Australian print media, we argue that a particular constellation of ‘child politics’ in which children are represented as innocent victims of poor parenting is at play. Parenting, however, is a code for mothers and it is their gendered responsibility for food and families for which they are now being held legally culpable in cases of neglect. The relationship between children and mothers has become the focus of moral discourses around childhood obesity, containing contradictory elements of innocence and risk, responsibility and danger. The intersection of child politics, mothering and individualized responsibility not only illuminates the ways in which gender is absent yet centrally implicated in obesity debates and policy, but also highlights how models of neoliberal governance encompass both State and decentralized forms of power in their attempt to regulate excess bodies.


Feminism & Psychology | 2012

Mothers as smoking guns: Fetal overnutrition and the reproduction of obesity

Megan Warin; Tanya Zivkovic; Vivienne M. Moore; Michael J. Davies

Mothers are expected to monitor their children’s dietary intakes and physical activities and are blamed for over feeding their children if they are obese. Women are also urged to manage their own weight in preparation for conception and during pregnancy in order to reduce complications associated with maternal obesity at childbirth. Through a theoretical lens of maternal blame, we argue that Australian media representations of scientific studies of the fetal overnutrition hypothesis extend behavioural maternal blame to the interiority of women’s bodies. Women’s intrauterine environments are positioned in the media as central to the intergenerational transmission of obesity, with women portrayed as responsible for passing obesity on to their children (and grandchildren) via biology and ill-informed ‘lifestyle choices’. Linking in with historical and contemporary discourses of maternal bodies and individual responsibility, the implications of the ‘double damage’ caused by women entails a concerning return to essentialism in which women’s bodies are being largely blamed for producing and reproducing obesity across generations.


Annals of Human Biology | 2011

Telescoping the origins of obesity to women's bodies: how gender inequalities are being squeezed out of Barker's hypothesis.

Megan Warin; Vivienne M. Moore; Tanya Zivkovic; Michael J. Davies

Aim: This paper traces the genealogy of the Barker hypothesis and its intersections with popular representations of scientific discourses about pregnancy and maternal obesity. Method: Drawing on Foucaults genealogical method, this study examines the historical ‘descent’ of the developmental origins of adult disease and its initial grounding in structural factors of gender inequality and low socioeconomic status. Results: In the more recent reproductive medicine literature, Barkers hypothesis has been used to understand the causes and consequences of foetal over-nutrition and has shifted its focus from social determinants to individual, gendered bodies. The print media has gainfully employed this conceptualization of obesity and, in doing so, placed women, and mothers in particular, as causal agents in the reproduction of obesity across generations. Such a ‘common sense’ understanding of obesity production and reproduction means that both the scientific literature and the public understanding of science has inadvertently assisted in putting women forward as the transmitters of obesity across generations. Conclusions: This powerful telescoping of the origins of obesity to womens bodies and their appetites is in stark contrast to earlier foci on gender inequalities and changing womens circumstances.


Ethnos | 2010

The Biographical Process of a Tibetan Lama

Tanya Zivkovic

This paper is concerned with the social life of a deceased Tibetan Buddhist lama. It details the role of death and successive lives in a lifestory that ends not with the passing of the subject but with his rebirth. Ethnographic attendance to tales told about the lamas death and reincarnation, and their textualization in the Tibetan convention of hagiography, or namtar, draw attention to quintessentially Tibetan understandings of the lifecourse. I argue that posthumous forms of the lama challenge the notion of biological death, and, in so doing, demonstrate that life can continue in new mediums including relics, reincarnation and hagiographical representations.


Body & Society | 2010

Tibetan Buddhist Embodiment: The Religious Bodies of a Deceased Lama:

Tanya Zivkovic

When bodies are conceived as permeable fields our physical forms become inseparable from each other and the world from which they manifest. The extension of one’s subjectivity to include cosmological divinities emphasizes the many other bodies which, in some cultural contexts, may overlap and unite with the world. In this article I explore how narratives of a Tibetan Buddhist high-lama’s death and trajectory of lives contain complex formulations of Tibetan theories of embodiment. An ethnographic attendance to biographical writings and teachings at the time of his funerary ceremonies reveals not only how trikaya, or the notion of three bodies, coheres in Tibetan conceptual frameworks, but also how the articulation of these bodies affects new ways to intersubjectively engage with the deceased.


Medical Anthropology | 2017

Moral Fiber: Breakfast as a Symbol of ‘a Good Start’ in an Australian Obesity Intervention

Megan Warin; Tanya Zivkovic; Vivienne M. Moore; Paul Russell Ward

ABSTRACT What are the symbolic meanings of breakfast in the context of one of Australia’s largest childhood obesity intervention programs? Utilizing a range of theoretical insights into the morality of food and eating and the anthropology of food, we trace how breakfast is packaged and promoted to families in an Australian community as a ‘healthy start’ to the day. Through ethnographic and historic investigation, we argue that eating breakfast and certain types of breakfast foods are symbolic of a classed, healthy lifestyle pattern, embodying parental knowledge and bodily regulation to routinely structure daily life. In communities where poverty and unemployment are harsh realities, well-intentioned programs that encourage people to eat a healthy breakfast are encoded with an assemblage of moral values—of knowledge, foods, families, and times and spaces—that are often difficult to reconcile with the wider sociocultural context in which many people live.


Children's Geographies | 2016

Participant observation in obesity research with children: striated and smooth spaces

Jessica Shipman Gunson; Megan Warin; Tanya Zivkovic; Vivienne M. Moore

This article discusses the value of conducting participant observation in obesity research with children in an Australian community setting. Obesity is highly stigmatized, and the use of activity-based interviews exposed the intellectual and embodied consciousness that children negotiate when they take part in research about food and bodies. Instead of opening up possibilities, interview-based activities can lead to a moral correctness about healthy lifestyles. It was through participant observation, in engagement with what Deleuze and Guattari [1988. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Athlone Press] call striated and smooth (or regulated and unregulated) spaces of childrens everyday activities, that richer understandings of obesity and childrens bodies became apparent. We argue that without participant observation, our understandings of what children say and draw about healthy lifestyles may be limited by the striated spaces in which we conduct our research and the constraints that accompany the cultural politics of childhood and obesity.


Body & Society | 2014

Consuming the Lama Transformations of Tibetan Buddhist Bodies

Tanya Zivkovic

Tibetan understandings about the bodies of spiritual teachers or lamas challenge the idea of a singular and bounded form. Tibetan Buddhists believe that the presence of the lama does not depend on their skin-encapsulated temporal body, or a singular lifespan. After death, it is not uncommon for a lama to materialize in other appearances or to become incorporated into the bodies of others through devotees’ consumption of their bodily remains. In this article, I discuss how the European ingestion of the holy bodies of Tibetan lamas creates new possibilities for embodied intersubjectivity, and also how this practice repositions bodily substance in cannibal discourse.


Medical Anthropology | 2018

Fat as Productive: Enactments of Fat in an Australian Suburb

Tanya Zivkovic; Megan Warin; Vivienne M. Moore; Paul Russell Ward; Michelle Jones

ABSTRACT By foregrounding positive and productive capacities of fat, we explore experiences of expanding, maintaining, or diminishing body sizes to accommodate the different meanings and enactments of fat. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in a South Australian community that has experienced significant socioeconomic disadvantage, we detail how the “problem” of fat in public health discourse is countered in the lived experience of people targeted for obesity intervention. In so doing, we attend to the multiple meanings and practices of fat that differ to the focus within public health interventions on the negative health consequences of overweight and obesity.


BMJ | 2015

O-51 Last rights? supporting end-of-life care in a culturally diverse society

Tanya Zivkovic

Background In Australia’s diverse ageing population there is an increasingly urgent need for culturally sensitive end-of-life care. Currently, end-of-life planning is promoted and standardised in the form of advance care directives (ACDs), which have a lower uptake in Asian migrant groups. Aim In presenting research funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award (Grant no: 150101506), this paper aims to identify and theorise points of uptake and resistance to advance care planning in Chinese and Indian communities in Adelaide, South Australia. Methods This research is qualitative in design and draws on ethnographic research methods (of participant observation, in-depth interviews and engagement in community life) in order to understand and evaluate how families and health care professionals respond to ACDs. Results Preliminary findings reveal that understandings of death, dying, personal autonomy and care differ across cultural and social contexts. The research suggests that neglect of these differences might be a major contributing factor to the low uptake of ACDs in these groups. Discussion Applying ethnographic research methods may enable researchers to identify the broader contextual features of death and dying that impact on the uptake of ACDs. This first study to analyse how South Australia’s Advance Care Directives Act 2013 is being received, interpreted and acted on by individuals, families and health care professionals in Australia’s ageing Asian migrant groups may be a platform for future studies on end-of-life care in other culturally diverse jurisdictions.

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Megan Warin

University of Adelaide

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Michelle Jones

University of South Australia

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