Angela Meah
Biographic Data
| ID | 307876 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Angela Meah |
| GIVEN NAMES | Angela |
| FAMILY NAME | Meah |
| SIGNATURE | MEAH A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Sheffield |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7177-2890 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 256 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
A heterosexual life
This paper presents the life history of one older woman, Jean, and engages with feminist debates about the nature of women s agency within institutionalised heterosexuality. As the data show, Jean grew up within an environment organised according to the principle of heterosexuality, at the levels of family, peer group and the local community. Her account indicates that while Jean inhabited the categories of heterosexuality, she still resisted man…
Taking humor seriously in contemporary food research
This paper highlights the social significance of humor in everyday interactions with food within families and related household contexts. The paper approaches humor in relational terms, emphasizing its role in negotiating the way power is exercised within the moralized context of “feeding the family.” Having reviewed previous work on the social significance of humor, the paper provides some examples of food-related humor from recent research with…
Negotiating the riskscapes of convenience food
Addressing the spatial dimensions of risk, this paper examines the multiple ways that consumers negotiate the \nëriskscapesí associated with the consumption of convenience food. It explores how convenience food poses a range of risks \nand potential ways of mitigating those risks. Drawing on empirical research from Germany and the UK, the paper demonstrates \nhow food risks should be contextualized within the practices of everyday life and how co…
The multiple ontologies of freshness in the UK and Portuguese agri‐food sectors
This paper adopts a material‐semiotic approach to explore the multiple ontologies of “freshness” as a quality of food. The analysis is based on fieldwork in the UK and Portugal, with particular emphasis on fish, poultry, and fruit and vegetables. Using evidence from archival research, ethnographic observation and interviews with food businesses (including major retailers and their suppliers) plus qualitative household‐level research with consumer…
Re-assessing vulnerability to foodborne illness: Pathways and practices
Foodborne illness is a major public health concern, often approached by focusing on socio-demographic groups who are considered most ‘vulnerable’ to foodborne disease such as elderly people or pregnant women. Based on a review of existing literature and original research with UK consumers, this paper proposes an alternative approach to analysing vulnerability to foodborne illness. Challenging conventional approaches that focus on the inherent vul…
Fathers, food practices and the circuits of intimacy in families in Northern England
Informed by a ‘theories of practice’ approach and moving beyond accounts that emphasise domestic foodwork as a wholly feminised task, this article draws upon a series of ethnographic studies undertaken in Northern England to examine men’s frequently overlooked contributions to feeding the family. Deploying the idea of ‘circuits of intimacy’, it specifically highlights how shopping, cooking and eating form part of the daily emotional practices thr…
Convenience as care: Culinary antinomies in practice
This paper addresses the social and cultural significance of convenience food, often regarded as among the least healthy and most unsustainable of dietary options, subject to frequent moral disapprobation. The paper focuses, in particular, on the relationship between convenience and care, conventionally seen in oppositional terms as a culinary antinomy. Informed by a 'theories of practice' approach, the paper presents empirical evidence from ethn…
Extending the Contested Spaces of the Modern Kitchen
This essay seeks to broaden understandings of the domestic kitchen in the global North which consign its significance to the preparation or cooking of food, an activity assumed to be undertaken chiefly by women. Here, I take a social practice perspective, examining 'the kitchen' not as a monolithic physical 'site' (in the spatial sense) occupied primarily by women users, but as one where a range of practices cohere, reflecting multiple meanings a…
The complex landscape of contemporary fathering in the UK
Distinguishing between fatherhood as a social construction and fathering as a social practice, this paper presents empirical evidence from the UK concerning the complex landscape of contemporary fathering. The paper focuses on the spatial and temporal dynamics of fathering, particularly following moments of rupture and transition such as family break-up or bereavement. Based on narrative interviews and ethnographic observation, including the co-p…
Re-imagining the kitchen as a site of memory
Extending the focus of previous geographical research on public spaces of remembering, this paper demonstrates the ways in which memory work also takes place in private domestic spaces. The paper draws on a combination of life history and ethnographic research undertaken in Northern England, examining kitchens as a specific lieu de mémoire, showing how they serve as places where valued items are displayed and material artefacts are curated as par…
Reflections on the Use of Visual Methods in a Qualitative Study of Domestic Kitchen Practices
Understanding everyday social practices is challenging as many are mundane and taken for granted and therefore difficult to articulate or recall. This paper reflects on the challenges encountered in a qualitative study underpinned by current theories of practice that incorporated visual methods. Using this approach meant everyone in a sample of 20 household cases, from children through to adults in their 80s, could show and tell their own stories…
I don’t think I ever had food poisoning’. A practice-based approach to understanding foodborne disease that originates in the home
Food stored, prepared, cooked and eaten at home contributes to foodborne disease which, globally, presents a significant public health burden. The aim of the study reported here was to investigate, analyse and interpret domestic kitchen practices in order to provide fresh insight about how the domestic setting might influence food safety. Using current theories of practice meant the research, which drew on qualitative and ethnographic methods, co…
Still blaming the consumer? Geographies of responsibility in domestic food safety practices
Drawing upon qualitative and ethnographic data collected in the UK, this paper discusses how public discourses and concerns about food safety are negotiated into everyday domestic kitchen practices. While many participants demonstrated ‘behaviours’ or ‘practices’ which could be seen to contravene or fall short of official guidelines, this does not necessarily indicate ‘ignorance’ or lack of responsibility on the part of consumers. Indeed, when ex…
Cooking up Consumer Anxieties about “Provenance” and “Ethics”: Why it Sometimes Matters where Foods Come from in Domestic Provisioning
Provenance is fundamentally about foods' point of origin. It is thus, unsurprising that studies of food provenance typically focus on circumstances of production and the routes foods follow to get to situations of exchange and, to a lesser extent, final consumption. However, this dominant framing leads to an asymmetry of attention between production and consumption. By neglecting the situatedness of food purchase and use, much of what makes prove…
Crowded kitchens: The ‘democratisation’ of domesticity
Building on previous work concerning the gendered nature of domestic space, this article focuses on the kitchen as a key site in which gendered roles and responsibilities are experienced and contested. As men have begun to engage more frequently in cooking and other domestic practices (albeit selectively and often on their own terms), this article argues that kitchens have become ‘crowded’ spaces for women. Drawing on evidence from focus groups, …
Reconceptualizing power and gendered subjectivities in domestic cooking spaces
Drawing on evidence from the Global North and South, this paper explores the power dynamics of domestic kitchens in different geographical contexts. Noting the gendered nature of domesticity, it contrasts those perspectives which regard women’s primary responsibility for foodwork as inherently oppressive, with others which see kitchens and associated domestic spaces as sites of potential empowerment for women. The paper explores the complex, spat…
'Think differently and be prepared to demonstrate trust': Findings from public hearings, England, on supporting lay people in public health roles
Professional support processes are critical for the establishment and maintenance of community health worker programmes. This paper reports on three public hearings held in England, UK, that were conducted as part of a national study into approaches to develop and support lay people in public health roles. Individuals with relevant theoretical or practical expertise, including lay activists, presented evidence in public as expert witnesses. Forma…
Food, Waste and Safety: Negotiating Conflicting Social Anxieties into the Practices of Domestic Provisioning
Two significant realms of social anxiety, visible in the discourses of media and public policy, potentially pull practices of home food provisioning in conflicting directions. On the one hand, campaigns to reduce the astonishing levels of food waste generated in the UK moralize acts of both food saving (such as keeping and finding creative culinary uses for leftovers) and food disposal. On the other hand, agencies concerned with food safety, incl…
I'm a Sex Kitten, Aren't I: Relocating Agency and Pleasure in Older Women's Narratives about Sex
This article draws on data collected as part of a two-year funded study concerning the making of modern heterosexuality in the East Yorkshire region of England. The starting point for our family-based empirical project has been to problematise feminist theorising that has conceptualised heterosexuality as a monolithic and static category in which women (and men) are denied agency. Via participants' nuanced accounts of being and becoming heterosex…
Saints and Slackers: Challenging Discourses about the Decline of Domestic Cooking
Amidst growing concern about both nutrition and food safety, anxiety about a loss of everyday cooking skills is a common part of public discourse. Within both the media and academia, it is widely perceived that there has been an erosion of the skills held by previous generations with the development of convenience foods and kitchen technologies cited as culpable in 'deskilling' current and future generations. These discourses are paralleled in po…
Men and masculinities
Peer reviewed
Fast Girls, Foreigners and GIs: An Exploration of the Discursive Strategies through Which the Status of Pre-Marital (Hetero)sexual Ignorance and Restraint Was Upheld during the Second World War
This paper explores contradictions within qualitative data gathered among women and men whose young adulthood coincided with the Second World War. These data were generated as part of an ESRC-funded project which investigated the making of heterosexual relationships cross-generationally. They suggest the co-existence of both a prevalent taboo or stigma associated with sexual knowledge and practice before and outside marriage, and personal experie…
What's Sex Got to do with it? A Family-Based Investigation of Growing up Heterosexual during the Twentieth Century
This paper explores findings from a cross-generational study of the making of heterosexual relationships in East Yorkshire, which has interviewed women and men within extended families. Using a feminist perspective, it examines the relationship between heterosexuality and adulthood, focussing on sexual attraction, courtship, first kisses, first love and first sex, as mediated within family relationships, and at different historical moments. In th…
Representing ‘Sex’ in the Research Process
This article explores the relationship between methodologies used for sex research and the way sex is represented in everyday life. Drawing on a cross‐generational study of heterosexuality, this article asks how the relationship between researcher and participant contributes to the production of knowledge around sexuality and how this then relates to the practices and concepts which constitute ‘sex’. Working amongst women and men aged between 15 …
‘What I Used to Do … On My Mother's Settee’: Spatial and emotional aspects of heterosexuality in England
Using data from an ongoing project which investigates continuities and changes in the institution of heterosexuality across the twentieth century, this article brings a spatialised perspective to bear on the contradictions implicit within family‐based models of hegemonic heterosexuality. In this context we contribute to the growing focus by geographers on theorising the spatial and emotional aspects of heterosexuality. Via interviews with women a…
Reconceptualizing power and gendered subjectivities in domestic cooking spaces
Drawing on evidence from the Global North and South, this paper explores the power dynamics of domestic kitchens in different geographical contexts. Noting the gendered nature of domesticity, it contrasts those perspectives which regard women’s primary responsibility for foodwork as inherently oppressive, with others which see kitchens and associated domestic spaces as sites of potential empowerment for women. The paper explores the complex, spat…
Crowded kitchens: The ‘democratisation’ of domesticity
Building on previous work concerning the gendered nature of domestic space, this article focuses on the kitchen as a key site in which gendered roles and responsibilities are experienced and contested. As men have begun to engage more frequently in cooking and other domestic practices (albeit selectively and often on their own terms), this article argues that kitchens have become ‘crowded’ spaces for women. Drawing on evidence from focus groups, …
Re-imagining the kitchen as a site of memory
Extending the focus of previous geographical research on public spaces of remembering, this paper demonstrates the ways in which memory work also takes place in private domestic spaces. The paper draws on a combination of life history and ethnographic research undertaken in Northern England, examining kitchens as a specific lieu de mémoire, showing how they serve as places where valued items are displayed and material artefacts are curated as par…
Saints and Slackers: Challenging Discourses about the Decline of Domestic Cooking
Amidst growing concern about both nutrition and food safety, anxiety about a loss of everyday cooking skills is a common part of public discourse. Within both the media and academia, it is widely perceived that there has been an erosion of the skills held by previous generations with the development of convenience foods and kitchen technologies cited as culpable in 'deskilling' current and future generations. These discourses are paralleled in po…
Convenience as care: Culinary antinomies in practice
This paper addresses the social and cultural significance of convenience food, often regarded as among the least healthy and most unsustainable of dietary options, subject to frequent moral disapprobation. The paper focuses, in particular, on the relationship between convenience and care, conventionally seen in oppositional terms as a culinary antinomy. Informed by a 'theories of practice' approach, the paper presents empirical evidence from ethn…
Food, Waste and Safety: Negotiating Conflicting Social Anxieties into the Practices of Domestic Provisioning
Two significant realms of social anxiety, visible in the discourses of media and public policy, potentially pull practices of home food provisioning in conflicting directions. On the one hand, campaigns to reduce the astonishing levels of food waste generated in the UK moralize acts of both food saving (such as keeping and finding creative culinary uses for leftovers) and food disposal. On the other hand, agencies concerned with food safety, incl…
The multiple ontologies of freshness in the UK and Portuguese agri‐food sectors
This paper adopts a material‐semiotic approach to explore the multiple ontologies of “freshness” as a quality of food. The analysis is based on fieldwork in the UK and Portugal, with particular emphasis on fish, poultry, and fruit and vegetables. Using evidence from archival research, ethnographic observation and interviews with food businesses (including major retailers and their suppliers) plus qualitative household‐level research with consumer…
The complex landscape of contemporary fathering in the UK
Distinguishing between fatherhood as a social construction and fathering as a social practice, this paper presents empirical evidence from the UK concerning the complex landscape of contemporary fathering. The paper focuses on the spatial and temporal dynamics of fathering, particularly following moments of rupture and transition such as family break-up or bereavement. Based on narrative interviews and ethnographic observation, including the co-p…
Reflections on the Use of Visual Methods in a Qualitative Study of Domestic Kitchen Practices
Understanding everyday social practices is challenging as many are mundane and taken for granted and therefore difficult to articulate or recall. This paper reflects on the challenges encountered in a qualitative study underpinned by current theories of practice that incorporated visual methods. Using this approach meant everyone in a sample of 20 household cases, from children through to adults in their 80s, could show and tell their own stories…
Cooking up Consumer Anxieties about “Provenance” and “Ethics”: Why it Sometimes Matters where Foods Come from in Domestic Provisioning
Provenance is fundamentally about foods' point of origin. It is thus, unsurprising that studies of food provenance typically focus on circumstances of production and the routes foods follow to get to situations of exchange and, to a lesser extent, final consumption. However, this dominant framing leads to an asymmetry of attention between production and consumption. By neglecting the situatedness of food purchase and use, much of what makes prove…
Fathers, food practices and the circuits of intimacy in families in Northern England
Informed by a ‘theories of practice’ approach and moving beyond accounts that emphasise domestic foodwork as a wholly feminised task, this article draws upon a series of ethnographic studies undertaken in Northern England to examine men’s frequently overlooked contributions to feeding the family. Deploying the idea of ‘circuits of intimacy’, it specifically highlights how shopping, cooking and eating form part of the daily emotional practices thr…
I don’t think I ever had food poisoning’. A practice-based approach to understanding foodborne disease that originates in the home
Food stored, prepared, cooked and eaten at home contributes to foodborne disease which, globally, presents a significant public health burden. The aim of the study reported here was to investigate, analyse and interpret domestic kitchen practices in order to provide fresh insight about how the domestic setting might influence food safety. Using current theories of practice meant the research, which drew on qualitative and ethnographic methods, co…
Extending the Contested Spaces of the Modern Kitchen
This essay seeks to broaden understandings of the domestic kitchen in the global North which consign its significance to the preparation or cooking of food, an activity assumed to be undertaken chiefly by women. Here, I take a social practice perspective, examining 'the kitchen' not as a monolithic physical 'site' (in the spatial sense) occupied primarily by women users, but as one where a range of practices cohere, reflecting multiple meanings a…
I'm a Sex Kitten, Aren't I: Relocating Agency and Pleasure in Older Women's Narratives about Sex
This article draws on data collected as part of a two-year funded study concerning the making of modern heterosexuality in the East Yorkshire region of England. The starting point for our family-based empirical project has been to problematise feminist theorising that has conceptualised heterosexuality as a monolithic and static category in which women (and men) are denied agency. Via participants' nuanced accounts of being and becoming heterosex…
A heterosexual life: Older women and agency within marriage and the family
This paper presents the life history of one older woman, Jean, and engages with feminist debates about the nature Of women's agency within institutionalised heterosexuality. As the data show, Jean grew up within an environment organised according to the principle of heterosexuality, at the levels of family, peer group and the local community. Her account indicates that while Jean inhabited the categories of heterosexuality, she still resisted man…
Taking humor seriously in contemporary food research
This paper highlights the social significance of humor in everyday interactions with food within families and related household contexts. The paper approaches humor in relational terms, emphasizing its role in negotiating the way power is exercised within the moralized context of “feeding the family.” Having reviewed previous work on the social significance of humor, the paper provides some examples of food-related humor from recent research with…
Representing ‘Sex’ in the Research Process
This article explores the relationship between methodologies used for sex research and the way sex is represented in everyday life. Drawing on a cross‐generational study of heterosexuality, this article asks how the relationship between researcher and participant contributes to the production of knowledge around sexuality and how this then relates to the practices and concepts which constitute ‘sex’. Working amongst women and men aged between 15 …
For Better or Worse: Heterosexuality Reinvented
Based upon a series of focus group discussions carried out in East Yorkshire, this article contributes to debates on both the nature and theorising of heterosexual relationships that have recently been investigated from diverse perspectives. These group discussions represent the launch of the first major empirical study of heterosexuality and ageing that has been undertaken in the UK. In drawing upon preliminary data from these focus groups, our …
Fast Girls, Foreigners and GIs: An Exploration of the Discursive Strategies through Which the Status of Pre-Marital (Hetero)sexual Ignorance and Restraint Was Upheld during the Second World War
This paper explores contradictions within qualitative data gathered among women and men whose young adulthood coincided with the Second World War. These data were generated as part of an ESRC-funded project which investigated the making of heterosexual relationships cross-generationally. They suggest the co-existence of both a prevalent taboo or stigma associated with sexual knowledge and practice before and outside marriage, and personal experie…
What's Sex Got to do with it? A Family-Based Investigation of Growing up Heterosexual during the Twentieth Century
This paper explores findings from a cross-generational study of the making of heterosexual relationships in East Yorkshire, which has interviewed women and men within extended families. Using a feminist perspective, it examines the relationship between heterosexuality and adulthood, focussing on sexual attraction, courtship, first kisses, first love and first sex, as mediated within family relationships, and at different historical moments. In th…
For Better or Worse: Heterosexuality Reinvented
Based upon a series of focus group discussions carried out in East Yorkshire, this article contributes to debates on both the nature and theorising of heterosexual relationships that have recently been investigated from diverse perspectives. These group discussions represent the launch of the first major empirical study of heterosexuality and ageing that has been undertaken in the UK. In drawing upon preliminary data from these focus groups, our …
‘What I Used to Do … On My Mother's Settee’: Spatial and emotional aspects of heterosexuality in England
Using data from an ongoing project which investigates continuities and changes in the institution of heterosexuality across the twentieth century, this article brings a spatialised perspective to bear on the contradictions implicit within family‐based models of hegemonic heterosexuality. In this context we contribute to the growing focus by geographers on theorising the spatial and emotional aspects of heterosexuality. Via interviews with women a…
A heterosexual life: Older women and agency within marriage and the family
This paper presents the life history of one older woman, Jean, and engages with feminist debates about the nature Of women's agency within institutionalised heterosexuality. As the data show, Jean grew up within an environment organised according to the principle of heterosexuality, at the levels of family, peer group and the local community. Her account indicates that while Jean inhabited the categories of heterosexuality, she still resisted man…
Representing ‘Sex’ in the Research Process
This article explores the relationship between methodologies used for sex research and the way sex is represented in everyday life. Drawing on a cross‐generational study of heterosexuality, this article asks how the relationship between researcher and participant contributes to the production of knowledge around sexuality and how this then relates to the practices and concepts which constitute ‘sex’. Working amongst women and men aged between 15 …
What's Sex Got to do with it? A Family-Based Investigation of Growing up Heterosexual during the Twentieth Century
This paper explores findings from a cross-generational study of the making of heterosexual relationships in East Yorkshire, which has interviewed women and men within extended families. Using a feminist perspective, it examines the relationship between heterosexuality and adulthood, focussing on sexual attraction, courtship, first kisses, first love and first sex, as mediated within family relationships, and at different historical moments. In th…
Men and masculinities
Peer reviewed
Fast Girls, Foreigners and GIs: An Exploration of the Discursive Strategies through Which the Status of Pre-Marital (Hetero)sexual Ignorance and Restraint Was Upheld during the Second World War
This paper explores contradictions within qualitative data gathered among women and men whose young adulthood coincided with the Second World War. These data were generated as part of an ESRC-funded project which investigated the making of heterosexual relationships cross-generationally. They suggest the co-existence of both a prevalent taboo or stigma associated with sexual knowledge and practice before and outside marriage, and personal experie…
I'm a Sex Kitten, Aren't I: Relocating Agency and Pleasure in Older Women's Narratives about Sex
This article draws on data collected as part of a two-year funded study concerning the making of modern heterosexuality in the East Yorkshire region of England. The starting point for our family-based empirical project has been to problematise feminist theorising that has conceptualised heterosexuality as a monolithic and static category in which women (and men) are denied agency. Via participants' nuanced accounts of being and becoming heterosex…
Saints and Slackers: Challenging Discourses about the Decline of Domestic Cooking
Amidst growing concern about both nutrition and food safety, anxiety about a loss of everyday cooking skills is a common part of public discourse. Within both the media and academia, it is widely perceived that there has been an erosion of the skills held by previous generations with the development of convenience foods and kitchen technologies cited as culpable in 'deskilling' current and future generations. These discourses are paralleled in po…
'Think differently and be prepared to demonstrate trust': Findings from public hearings, England, on supporting lay people in public health roles
Professional support processes are critical for the establishment and maintenance of community health worker programmes. This paper reports on three public hearings held in England, UK, that were conducted as part of a national study into approaches to develop and support lay people in public health roles. Individuals with relevant theoretical or practical expertise, including lay activists, presented evidence in public as expert witnesses. Forma…
Food, Waste and Safety: Negotiating Conflicting Social Anxieties into the Practices of Domestic Provisioning
Two significant realms of social anxiety, visible in the discourses of media and public policy, potentially pull practices of home food provisioning in conflicting directions. On the one hand, campaigns to reduce the astonishing levels of food waste generated in the UK moralize acts of both food saving (such as keeping and finding creative culinary uses for leftovers) and food disposal. On the other hand, agencies concerned with food safety, incl…
Still blaming the consumer? Geographies of responsibility in domestic food safety practices
Drawing upon qualitative and ethnographic data collected in the UK, this paper discusses how public discourses and concerns about food safety are negotiated into everyday domestic kitchen practices. While many participants demonstrated ‘behaviours’ or ‘practices’ which could be seen to contravene or fall short of official guidelines, this does not necessarily indicate ‘ignorance’ or lack of responsibility on the part of consumers. Indeed, when ex…
Cooking up Consumer Anxieties about “Provenance” and “Ethics”: Why it Sometimes Matters where Foods Come from in Domestic Provisioning
Provenance is fundamentally about foods' point of origin. It is thus, unsurprising that studies of food provenance typically focus on circumstances of production and the routes foods follow to get to situations of exchange and, to a lesser extent, final consumption. However, this dominant framing leads to an asymmetry of attention between production and consumption. By neglecting the situatedness of food purchase and use, much of what makes prove…
Crowded kitchens: The ‘democratisation’ of domesticity
Building on previous work concerning the gendered nature of domestic space, this article focuses on the kitchen as a key site in which gendered roles and responsibilities are experienced and contested. As men have begun to engage more frequently in cooking and other domestic practices (albeit selectively and often on their own terms), this article argues that kitchens have become ‘crowded’ spaces for women. Drawing on evidence from focus groups, …
Reconceptualizing power and gendered subjectivities in domestic cooking spaces
Drawing on evidence from the Global North and South, this paper explores the power dynamics of domestic kitchens in different geographical contexts. Noting the gendered nature of domesticity, it contrasts those perspectives which regard women’s primary responsibility for foodwork as inherently oppressive, with others which see kitchens and associated domestic spaces as sites of potential empowerment for women. The paper explores the complex, spat…
I don’t think I ever had food poisoning’. A practice-based approach to understanding foodborne disease that originates in the home
Food stored, prepared, cooked and eaten at home contributes to foodborne disease which, globally, presents a significant public health burden. The aim of the study reported here was to investigate, analyse and interpret domestic kitchen practices in order to provide fresh insight about how the domestic setting might influence food safety. Using current theories of practice meant the research, which drew on qualitative and ethnographic methods, co…
Extending the Contested Spaces of the Modern Kitchen
This essay seeks to broaden understandings of the domestic kitchen in the global North which consign its significance to the preparation or cooking of food, an activity assumed to be undertaken chiefly by women. Here, I take a social practice perspective, examining 'the kitchen' not as a monolithic physical 'site' (in the spatial sense) occupied primarily by women users, but as one where a range of practices cohere, reflecting multiple meanings a…
The complex landscape of contemporary fathering in the UK
Distinguishing between fatherhood as a social construction and fathering as a social practice, this paper presents empirical evidence from the UK concerning the complex landscape of contemporary fathering. The paper focuses on the spatial and temporal dynamics of fathering, particularly following moments of rupture and transition such as family break-up or bereavement. Based on narrative interviews and ethnographic observation, including the co-p…
Re-imagining the kitchen as a site of memory
Extending the focus of previous geographical research on public spaces of remembering, this paper demonstrates the ways in which memory work also takes place in private domestic spaces. The paper draws on a combination of life history and ethnographic research undertaken in Northern England, examining kitchens as a specific lieu de mémoire, showing how they serve as places where valued items are displayed and material artefacts are curated as par…
Reflections on the Use of Visual Methods in a Qualitative Study of Domestic Kitchen Practices
Understanding everyday social practices is challenging as many are mundane and taken for granted and therefore difficult to articulate or recall. This paper reflects on the challenges encountered in a qualitative study underpinned by current theories of practice that incorporated visual methods. Using this approach meant everyone in a sample of 20 household cases, from children through to adults in their 80s, could show and tell their own stories…
Re-assessing vulnerability to foodborne illness: Pathways and practices
Foodborne illness is a major public health concern, often approached by focusing on socio-demographic groups who are considered most ‘vulnerable’ to foodborne disease such as elderly people or pregnant women. Based on a review of existing literature and original research with UK consumers, this paper proposes an alternative approach to analysing vulnerability to foodborne illness. Challenging conventional approaches that focus on the inherent vul…
Fathers, food practices and the circuits of intimacy in families in Northern England
Informed by a ‘theories of practice’ approach and moving beyond accounts that emphasise domestic foodwork as a wholly feminised task, this article draws upon a series of ethnographic studies undertaken in Northern England to examine men’s frequently overlooked contributions to feeding the family. Deploying the idea of ‘circuits of intimacy’, it specifically highlights how shopping, cooking and eating form part of the daily emotional practices thr…
Convenience as care: Culinary antinomies in practice
This paper addresses the social and cultural significance of convenience food, often regarded as among the least healthy and most unsustainable of dietary options, subject to frequent moral disapprobation. The paper focuses, in particular, on the relationship between convenience and care, conventionally seen in oppositional terms as a culinary antinomy. Informed by a 'theories of practice' approach, the paper presents empirical evidence from ethn…
Negotiating the riskscapes of convenience food
Addressing the spatial dimensions of risk, this paper examines the multiple ways that consumers negotiate the \nëriskscapesí associated with the consumption of convenience food. It explores how convenience food poses a range of risks \nand potential ways of mitigating those risks. Drawing on empirical research from Germany and the UK, the paper demonstrates \nhow food risks should be contextualized within the practices of everyday life and how co…
The multiple ontologies of freshness in the UK and Portuguese agri‐food sectors
This paper adopts a material‐semiotic approach to explore the multiple ontologies of “freshness” as a quality of food. The analysis is based on fieldwork in the UK and Portugal, with particular emphasis on fish, poultry, and fruit and vegetables. Using evidence from archival research, ethnographic observation and interviews with food businesses (including major retailers and their suppliers) plus qualitative household‐level research with consumer…
Sociology (25 works) · Political science (16 works) · Social science (15 works) · Gender Studies (13 works) · Culinary Culture and Tourism (12 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Ethnography (7 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Organic Food and Agriculture (7 works)