Feeding Children Inside and Outside the Home ― Critical Perspectives

Feeding Children Inside and Outside the Home provides new critical approaches to feeding children as a social practice influenced by a variety of institutions, norms, values and moral accountability. This collection will seek to provide an interrogation of contemporary parenting culture across geographical contexts, the everyday practices of feeding and eating inside and outside the home, surveillance and the broader issue of the morality of food.

Engaging with theoretical debates around the moralization of feeding and eating practices, intensive parenting and everyday food consumption practices inside and outside the home, this collection provides a timely reflection on government and marketplace discourses of feeding children, as well as their relations to the micro and macro politics of family life

This edited book will bring together researchers providing a more nuanced and in-depth account of practices and discourses on feeding children in different socio-cultural and geographical contexts. Although sociologically informed, this will be an inter-disciplinary conversation taking into account perspectives from anthropological, socio-historical and interpretive consumer research. The book will appeal to researchers and students looking for an overview of the current state of art of existing studies of feeding children in the social sciences.

Vicki Harman is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at University of Surrey. Her research interests include family life in contemporary Britain and social divisions including gender, social class and ethnicity. Vicki has conducted qualitative research into food practices within families, focusing on feeding the family on a low or reduced income and parents’ perspectives of preparing lunchboxes for their children. She has published her research in journals including Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, Young Consumers, International Journal of Consumer Studies and the British Journal of Social Work.

Benedetta Cappellini is a Senior Lecturer in Marketing and Consumer Behaviour at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research interests are in food consumption, material culture, family consumption and motherhood and consumption. She has published in journals including Sociology, The Sociological Review, Consumption, Markets and Culture, Journal of Marketing Management, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Consumer Behaviour and Advances in Consumer Research. She is the co-editor of The Practice of the Meal: Families, food and the market place (Routledge, 2016).

Charlotte Faircloth is a Lecturer in the Sociology of Gender at University College London. Her research interests include parenthood, infant feeding, gender, intimacy and equality. She has published in journals including Sociology, The Sociological Review, Health, Risk and Society and Ethnos. She is the author of Militant Lactivism? Attachment parenting and intensive motherhood in the UK and France (Berghahn Books, 2013), co-author of Parenting Culture Studies (Palgrave, 2014) and co-editor of Parenting in Global Perspective: Negotiating ideologies of kinship, self and politics (Routledge, 2013).