The Terror Within: Obesity in Post 9/11 U.S. Life

This essay is based on the premise that all biological sites are also cultural sites. Its central claim is that understanding the cultural work performed by the public health campaign against obesity is essential to a broader accounting of post 9/11 life in the United States. Through analysis of the relationship between the simultaneous wars against obesity and terror, this essay argues that the “war against obesity” plays a role in sustaining the “war on terror” by contributing to the post 9/11 culture of fear, providing a focus for wartime communal self-sacrifice, and obscuring the toll that the war on terror is taking on minority communities

Functional foods for health: Negotiation and implications

If functional foods are to provide one of the solutions to the problems of dietary health that we currently face, consumers will need to incorporate them into their lives, making sense of them in relation to existing beliefs and values. Therefore, we must understand not only the scientific means of producing foods with additional health benefits, but also the relationship between functional foods and existing understandings of food and health. More research is needed in this area, particularly in the United States where very little scholarly (as opposed to market) research has been conducted to examine the cultural dynamics of functional foods. Here I present some preliminary findings based on my analyses of the intersections between functional foods and beliefs about dietary health among American consumers

Conscious, Complacent, Fearful: Agri-Food Tech’s Market-Making Public Imaginaries

While the tech sector has seized upon the food system as an area in which it can have a major impact, innovators within the agri-food tech domain are dogged by concerns about public acceptance of technologies that may be controversial or simply not of interest. At the same time, because they operate within an investor-dependent political economy, they must demonstrate that the public will consume the products they are creating. To both secure markets and legitimate their approaches to problem-solving, entrepreneurial innovators draw on three existing imaginaries of consumers, each of which articulates with a particular tendency they have pursued in problem-solving. Reflecting a tendency of solutionism, those promoting technologies that promise minimal processing and/or short or traceable supply chains invoke a health- and eco-conscious consumer. In keeping with technofixes, those promoting technologies of mimicry invoke a complacent consumer. Reflecting the tendency toward scientism in problem-solving and related projections of public knowledge deficits, those promoting potentially controversial technologies invoke a fearful consumer and embrace transparency to inform and assure such consumers. By promising future consumers who will willingly accept emerging technologies, each of these imaginaries seeks to resolve–for investors–potential problems of consumer acceptance generated by the particular approaches to problem-solving innovators have adopted. While STS scholars have shown how public-facing engagement exercises and policy work are often limited by deficit-driven imaginaries of the public, in these investor-facing spaces possible objections are both imagined and overcome without any interaction with actual publics

Social science - STEM collaborations in agriculture, food and beyond: an STSFAN manifesto.

Interdisciplinary research needs innovation. As an action-oriented intervention, this Manifesto begins from the authors' experiences as social scientists working within interdisciplinary science and technology collaborations in agriculture and food. We draw from these experiences to: 1) explain what social scientists contribute to interdisciplinary agri-food tech collaborations; (2) describe barriers to substantive and meaningful collaboration; and (3) propose ways to overcome these barriers. We encourage funding bodies to develop mechanisms that ensure funded projects respect the integrity of social science expertise and incorporate its insights. We also call for the integration of social scientific questions and methods in interdisciplinary projects from the outset, and for a genuine curiosity on the part of STEM and social science researchers alike about the knowledge and skills each of us has to offer. We contend that cultivating such integration and curiosity within interdisciplinary collaborations will make them more enriching for all researchers involved, and more likely to generate socially beneficial outcomes

Cultivating intellectual community in academia: reflections from the Science and Technology Studies Food and Agriculture Network (STSFAN).

Scholarship flourishes in inclusive environments where open deliberations and generative feedback expand both individual and collective thinking. Many researchers, however, have limited access to such settings, and most conventional academic conferences fall short of promises to provide them. We have written this Field Report to share our methods for cultivating a vibrant intellectual community within the Science and Technology Studies Food and Agriculture Network (STSFAN). This is paired with insights from 21 network members on aspects that have allowed STSFAN to thrive, even amid a global pandemic. Our hope is that these insights will encourage others to cultivate their own intellectual communities, where they too can receive the support they need to deepen their scholarship and strengthen their intellectual relationships