In the context of concerns about childhood obesity, mothers are placed at the forefront of responsibility for shaping the eating behaviour and consequently the health of their young children. This is evident in a multitude of diverse sites such as government reports, health promotion materials, reality TV shows and the advice of childcare nurses and preschools. These sites produce a range of resources available to mothers to draw on to constitute themselves as mothers in terms of caring for their children's health. Drawing on a qualitative study of mothers recruited through three Australian preschool centres, this article examines how the working‐class and middle‐class mothers of preschool‐aged children engage with knowledge about motherhood, children and health and how those engagements impact on their mothering, their foodwork and their children. We argue that, unlike the working‐class mothers pathologised in some literature on obesity, these working‐class mothers demonstrated a no‐nonsense (but still responsibilised) approach to feeding their children. The middle‐class mothers, on the other hand, were more likely to engage in practices of self‐surveillance and to demonstrate considerable anxieties about the appropriateness of their practices for their children's current and future health.

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Contemporary biomedicine identifies childhood obesity as a major risk factor for health problems in adulthood. Significantly increased rates of excessive body weight in the population has been widely reported, with moral frameworks often used in both media and public health discourses on the issue. In turn, research into, and media reports identifying, the causes of childhood obesity have proliferated. While debate continues about the true rates of obesity in the population as well as the projected health effects of obesity (Gard & Wright, 2005; Olds, 2010; Campos, 2004), public health responses to 'the problem' have been mobilised in various settings (Vander Schee, 2009; Dehgan, Akhtar-Danesh & Merchant, 2005). The 'family' is commonly viewed as one of the most critical sites for early intervention and prevention of childhood obesity (Gruber & Haldeman, 2009). As a result, the roles and responsibilities of parents in caring for the diet and weight of young children have come under increasing scrutiny (see, for example, Golan, Weizman, Apter & Fainaru, 1998; Brown & Ogden, 2004). This attention to the family is shaped by, and in turn reproduces, distinctly gendered discourses. Some researchers have argued, for example, that childhood obesity-related discourse and policy rely on gender stereotypes, disproportionally burdening women as mothers (Maher,

Stem cell science provides an exemplary study of the 'management of hope'. On the one hand, raising 'hopes' and expectations is a seen as a necessary aspect of securing investment in promising innovative research. On the other, such hyperbole risks raising hopes to a level that may lead people to undertake undue risks, which may ultimately undermine confidence in medical research. In this context, the 'management of hope' thus involves the negotiation of competing claims of truth about the value and safety of particular treatments and about the trustworthiness of providers. Using Gieryn's concept of boundary-work, this article examines the means by which this work of 'managing hope' is undertaken. Drawing on data collected as part of our study that investigated the perspectives of those who are consulted by patients and their carers about stem cell treatments, we explore how these community advisors – both scientists and clinicians with a stake in stem cell research and representatives from patient advocacy groups – demarcate the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate treatments. In particular, we examine how these actors rhetorically use 'evidence' to achieve this demarcation. We argue that analysing accounts of how advisors respond to patient enquiries about stem cell treatments offers a window for examining the workings of the politics of hope within contemporary bioscience and biomedicine. In conclusion, we emphasize the need to re-conceptualize the boundary between science and non-science so as to allow a better appreciation of the realities of health care in the age of medical travel.