Seminars
Feeding Motherhood
Presenter details and abstracts
- Helene Brembeck - 'I have to like what my daughter likes'. Stories on food, cooking and motherhood by Bosnian refugee women in Sweden
- Bente Halkier - Challenging consumption – challenging mothering?
- Dan Cook - What Feeds Motherhood When Mothers Feed Children? Commercial Epistemologies and Everyday Practices
Title: 'I have to like what my daughter likes'. Stories on food, cooking and motherhood by Bosnian refugee women in Sweden
Presenter: Professor Helene Brembeck, Centre for Consumer Science, CFK, University of Gothenburg
Helene Brembeck is Professor of Ethnology and Co-director in the Centre for Consumer Science (CFK) at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. The focus of her research interests encompasses motherhood and childhood in consumer culture, food and eating. She has published several books and anthologies in this field including Little Monsters: De Coupling Assemblages of Consumption (2007, LIT Verlag, co-edited with Karin M. Ekström and Magnus Mörck); Elusive Consumption (2004, Berg, co-edited with Karin M. Ekström); and Hem till McDonald's (Home to McDonald's) (2007, Carlssons) about family dining at McDonald's. Her most recent work is the anthology 'Ju mer vi är tillsammans. Om fyrtiotalisterna och maten' (2010, Carlsson) about the baby-boomer generation and food.
Presentation:
In this paper I will present findings from a study of Bosnian refugee women in Sweden and food. Food and cooking was closely related to their identities as women and mothers, and they had learned to cook as little girls by watching their mothers. A main motive for their flight to Sweden was, however, the well being of their children, and they were all listening closely to their voices and food preferences in an attempt to help them with a smooth integration.
That mothers adhere to their children's demands for food from the new country, and adapts their cooking is a common experience from many European countries. Cases of hybrid cooking were numerous.
Another strategy used by the mother's was one of synchronizing tastes. Synchronization of tastes is about learning 'family tastes' and what is considered normal food choices. For mother, to be able to talk of yourself as a 'soup family' is very important.
In refugee families this process is to a large extent in the hands of the children, who knows best about normality, food preferences and children's food in the new country. It is, however, managed by mother. The whole family has to like what the children like. This is how I interpret the quotation in the title. Mothers have to work continually to synchronize tastes in order to materialize family togetherness in new circumstances and their own identities as mothers and cooks. Synchronizing tastes is a way to perform good motherhood.
Title: Challenging consumption – challenging mothering?
Presenter: Bente Halkier, Roskilde University, Denmark
Bente Halkier is associate professor at Department of Communication, Business and Information Technologies, Roskilde University, Denmark. Her research interests focus on everyday life oriented sociology of consumption and user-oriented communication research in the field of food. She is currently finishing a monograph for Ashgate called 'Consumption challenged. Food and normativity in medialised everyday lives'. She has previously published in e.g. Appetite, Food, Culture and Society, International Journal of Consumer Studies, and Journal of Consumer Culture.
Presentation:
During the last twenty years, there has been an increased ascription of societal agency to ordinary citizens in their capacities as consumers. In public debates, communication campaigns and public policies, private consumers are being called upon as responsible for helping to solve a broad array of societal problems, such as environmental problems and health problems.
Through these medialised processes of representing the individual consumer as carriers of change agency, ordinary routinised consumption activities are becoming normatively challenged. Ordinary food practitioners handle such challenges in different ways, and one of the questions in relation to motherhood is how mothering practices are entangled in such normative everyday life dealings in food practices.
Theoretically, the presentation will take a starting point in a practice theoretical perspective. Empirically, the presentation will compare normative constructions and negotiations of mothering in food practices from four qualitative empirical case-studies of challenged food consumption in Denmark.
Title: What Feeds Motherhood When Mothers Feed Children? Commercial Epistemologies and Everyday Practices
Presenter: Daniel Thomas Cook, Rutgers University, Camden, New Jersey, USA
Daniel Thomas Cook is associate professor of Childhood Studies and Sociology at Rutgers University, Camden, New Jersey, USA. He is editor of Symbolic Childhood (2002), Lived Experiences of Public Consumption (2008) and author of The Commodification of Childhood (2004) as well as a number of articles and book chapters on consumer society, childhood, leisure and urban culture. Cook also serves as an Editor of Childhood: A Journal of Global Child Research.
Presentation:
In historical and contemporary arrangements, commercial actors (marketers, manufactures, designers, advertisers and others) have sought to know, construct and deploy cultural understandings of mothers and motherhood. Never divorced from beliefs about children and childhood, commercial figurations of motherhood often produce contradictory portrayals of mothers—for instance, as both obstacles to and vehicles for the sale of goods intended for children. Mothers themselves experience the tensions which accompany occupying a paradoxical position vis-à-vis their children and the marketplace.
This talk focuses on the place of food, meals and the feeding in a few of the multiple ways that motherhood continues to be configured and reconfigured in relation to commercial life. The discussion will make use of multiple sources—interviews with mothers, analysis of advice material for mothers, discussion on blogs and advertising images of mothers, children and food—in order to offer a framework for thinking about the malleable position of commodities and commercial meanings in the motherhood-childhood-commercial nexus.