Unwrapping school lunch: Examining the social dynamics and caring relationships that play out during school lunch

Students are important stakeholders in school food programs. Yet children’s daily experiences and voices are often overlooked in advocacy around school food. In Canada, where the federal government recently expressed interest in creating a National School Food Program, nearly no research has documented the first-hand experiences of children during lunch. This ethnographic study draws on data collected during 36 lunchtimes in three Canadian schools during a transitional period in a school district’s lunch program. The findings unwrap the powerful role of students’ perceptions of and relationships to food in shaping their social interactions, and their sense of care, connection, and identity. Classroom observations coupled with photos of school lunches demonstrate the wide diversity of foods eaten at school and the nuanced, complex, and sometimes divergent meanings children give to food, school lunch and the people involved in preparing, serving, supervising, and sharing lunchtime experiences. Students demonstrated in-depth knowledge of the food choices and attitudes of their peers and actively marked out their identities vis-à-vis food. Students frequently talked about food as a site of care and support, and both the social relationships and care work that played out were a major part of school lunch experiences. Understanding the intricacies of children’s school lunch experiences, including the relationships, meanings, and values that shape school lunch, will be critical for creating robust school food programs and policies in Canada that better serve the needs of children and reduce rather than reproduce existing health and social inequalities.Peer reviewe

Assessing a New Clue to How Much Carbon Plants Take Up

Current climate models disagree on how much carbon dioxide land ecosystems take up for photosynthesis. Tracking the stronger carbonyl sulfide signal could help

Parents, teenagers, and adolescent sexuality

textOver the past two decades, communities across the nation have been mired in battles over sexuality, including gay rights, censorship, and sex education. Based on indepth interview data with 47 racially and economically diverse parents of teenagers, this study explores how parents make sense of and try to guide their children's sexuality in the midst of these hotly contested and politically charged debates. The findings highlight a paradox in parents' understandings of their children's sexuality: the parents interviewed for this study do not think of their own children as sexual subjects, even as they construct adolescents, in general, as highly sexual and sexualized. The author explores this paradox throughout the dissertation. She argues that parents' understandings reflect the complex interplay of myriad forces: these include the culture of sexual fear in the U.S.; dominant understandings of adolescence; gender, race, class, and sexual inequalities; and a pervasive American individualist ethos that situates the blame for any negative outcomes of teen sexuality on parents and their children. At the same time, however, these constructions often bolster social inequality. As the author shows, parents' understandings of adolescent sexuality, and their lessons to their children about sexuality, are not only shaped by, but also serve to legitimize, hierarchies and inequalities based on race, class, gender, sexuality, and age. The final chapter discusses the specific social and cultural conditions that might enable parents to think of their children as sexual subjects.Sociolog

Not My Kid What Parents Believe about the Sex Lives of Their Teenagers

Cover -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Sex Panics: Debates over Sex Education and the Construction of Teen Sexuality -- 2. The Asexual Teen: Naïveté, Dependence, and Sexual Danger -- 3. Negotiating the Erotic: When Parents and Teens Talk about Sex -- 4. The Hypersexual Teen: Sexy Bodies, Raging Hormones, and Irresponsibility -- 5. Other Teens: How Race, Class, and Gender Matter -- 6. Anxious Monitoring: Strategies of Protection and Surveillance -- 7. Uncertainty in Parents' Sexual Lessons -- 8. Conclusion: Reconstructing Teen Sexuality -- Methods Appendix -- Notes -- References -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- V -- W -- Y -- About the AuthorDescription based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, YYYY. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries

It\u27s Like Being In Church and Being On a Field Trip: The Date Versus Party Situation In College Students\u27 Accounts of Hooking Up

This article examines the importance of setting as a factor shaping college students\u27 dating and sexual behavior using a Goffmanian framework to explore how U.S. students interpret a vignette describing a casual heterosexual encounter at a party followed by a sexless dinner date. Rather than simply follow generalized cultural scripts, students indicate that college heterosexual encounters are guided by standardized patterns of behaviors based on the distinct settings and roles associated with each situation. Students view sexual behavior as appropriate to being a partygoer but unsuitable to being on a date. As such, hooking up with a stranger at a party can be more appropriate than having sex with the same person on a first date

Casual Hookups to Formal Dates: Refining the Boundaries of the Sexual Double Standard

Hooking up, a popular type of sexual behavior among college students, has become a pathway to dating relationships. Based on open-ended narratives written by 273 undergraduates, we analyze how students interpreted a vignette describing a heterosexual hookup followed by a sexless first date. In contrast to the sexual script which holds that women want relationships more than sex and men care about sex more than relationships, students generally accorded women sexual agency and desire in the hookup and validated men\u27s post-hookup relationship interest. However, in explaining the sexless date, students typically reasoned the woman was being chaste and withholding sex to redeem her reputation whereas they often characterized the man\u27s abstinence in terms of a pity date. The findings underscore the tenacity of gendered sexual scripts around heterosexual dates and hookups but also reveal fissures and contradictions that suggest some changes to the sexual double standard

A critical review of postfeminist sensibility

This paper critically reviews how feminist academic psychologists, social scientists, and media scholars have developed Rosalind Gill\u27s generative construct “postfeminist sensibility.” We describe the key themes of postfeminist sensibility, a noncoherent set of ideas about femininity, embodiment, and empowerment circulating across a range of media. Ideas that inform women\u27s sense of self, making postfeminist sensibility an important object for psychological study. We then consider research that drew on postfeminist sensibility, focusing on new sexual subjectivities, which developed analysis of agency, empowerment, and the possibilities and limitations in taking up new subjectivities associated with postfeminism, as well as who could take up these subjectivities. We show how such work identified complexities and contradictions in postfeminist sensibility and offer suggestions for how this work might be further developed, particularly by intersectionality-informed research. In the final section, we address contemporary debates surrounding postfeminism. We consider challenges and counterarguments to postfeminist sensibility as a useful term for describing contemporary patterns of sense-making on gender, making the case for continuing research on postfeminist sensibility in the areas of digital cultures, a transformative imperative that includes the mind as well as the body, transnational postfeminism, and new forms of feminist activism. We conclude that such work would benefit from considering the ways that different technologies mediate the ideas and practices associated with postfeminist sensibility