Enacting the overweight body in residential child care: Eating and agency beyond the nature–culture divide

Abstract

This article reconstructs multiple enactments of overweight bodies in residential child care by analysing ethnographic field notes. The account links in with current tendencies in childhood studies to reach a more material and relational understanding of children’s agency. Examining concepts of embodiment as discussed in science and technology studies and phenomenology, the article offers an approach to childhood studies which connects the corporeal and agency. It shows how different enactments of children’s bodies and food produce different forms of agency.

An Ontological Turn for Childhood Studies?

“…Taking questions of ontology seriously may mean that we have to defer the decision about the ontological status of children and focus instead on the nature of the ontological work which constitutes children and childhood in diverse ways (see Lee, ; n12, 479) while considering our own constitutive role in the production of knowledge. In his study of overweight children in residential care, Eßer () provides an interesting illustration of how a careful and open‐minded analysis of ethnographic field notes may allow the researcher to disclose different enactments of children's bodies and food which reflect the expression of different forms of agency. However, these various enactments of the overweight body do not just create different ontological realities but they also highlight the entangled relation of the researcher with the object of inquiry and the possibility for producing knowledge differently.…”

Rethinking children’s agency: Power, assemblages, freedom and materiality

“…This body of work has included attempts to critique, refine or redefine agency in various ways (Esser et al, 2016;Hackett et al, 2015;Oswell, 2013;Tisdall and Punch, 2012), including in relation to questions of scale (Ansell, 2009), children's voices (Komulainen, 2007;Kraftl, 2013), children's eating habits (Eßer, 2017), children living on the streets (Bordonaro, 2012;Davies, 2008), children living through armed conflict (Seymour, 2012), participatory methods (Gallacher and Gallagher, 2008;Holland et al, 2010), schools and early years institutions (Guo and Dalli, 2016;Teague, 2014), institutional practices of inclusion (Dalkilic and Vadeboncoeur, 2016) and child protection social work (Ackermann and Robin, 2016), to name just a few examples.…”

“…Without getting into a detailed conceptual discussion of this criticism, I want to suggest that the organic/inorganic distinction may be useful in childhood studies for analytical reasons, particularly when it comes to engaging children, practitioners and childhood studies students in thinking about their relations with the material world in ways that might initially seem counter-intuitive. If we want to rework childhood studies' analyses to argue that, for example, children's eating is shaped by the agencies of food (Eßer, 2017), or that groundwater is an agent that affects children's relations with place (Horton and Kraftl, 2018), then starting with a Bergsonian distinction between the inorganic and the organic -understood as tendencies in productive tension with each other, rather than mutually exclusive categories -might help to make sense of the fact that there are clearly different kinds of agency involved in these situations, and that these agencies may not be straightforwardly comparable.…”

Emerging scholars of Childhood Studies

“…Maybe NATs might be understood as referring to such alterchildhoods, which imply a different entanglement with the world than we might expect from children. I myself tried to show how children's eating practices are part of their different engagement with the world, which is itself deeply "political" (Eßer, 2017a). So, to conclude: same same but different: Should we be moving to 'Post-Childhood Studies'?…”

“…It makes a difference in terms of ‘the political’ whether we claim the same (liberal) rights for children and adults or whether we question the notions that the assumption of individual agency is based on. I would argue that the latter is where Childhood Studies may bear fruit, insofar as it may show how the material and corporeal politics of everyday practices shape children’s realities (Kraftl, 2013) – and even their bodies (Eßer, 2017a). This shift from independence to interdependence also means that Childhood Studies may not be limited to the analysis of childhood.…”