Militant Lactivism?

Militant Lactivism? PDF Author: Charlotte Faircloth
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857457594
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Following networks of mothers in London and Paris, the author profiles the narratives of women who breastfeed their children to full term, typically a period of several years, as part of an 'attachment parenting' philosophy. These mothers talk about their decision to continue breastfeeding as 'the natural thing to do': 'evolutionarily appropriate', 'scientifically best' and 'what feels right in their hearts'. Through a theoretical focus on knowledge claims and accountability, the author frames these accounts within a wider context of 'intensive parenting', arguing that parenting practices – infant feeding in particular – have become a highly moralized affair for mothers, practices which they feel are a critical aspect of their 'identity work'. The book investigates why, how and with what implications some of these mothers describe themselves as 'militant lactivists' and reflects on wider parenting culture in the UK and France. Discussing gender, feminism and activism, this study contributes to kinship and family studies by exploring how relatedness is enacted in conjunction to constructions of the self.

Militant Lactivism?

Militant Lactivism? PDF Author: Charlotte Faircloth
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857457594
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Get Book Here

Book Description
Following networks of mothers in London and Paris, the author profiles the narratives of women who breastfeed their children to full term, typically a period of several years, as part of an 'attachment parenting' philosophy. These mothers talk about their decision to continue breastfeeding as 'the natural thing to do': 'evolutionarily appropriate', 'scientifically best' and 'what feels right in their hearts'. Through a theoretical focus on knowledge claims and accountability, the author frames these accounts within a wider context of 'intensive parenting', arguing that parenting practices – infant feeding in particular – have become a highly moralized affair for mothers, practices which they feel are a critical aspect of their 'identity work'. The book investigates why, how and with what implications some of these mothers describe themselves as 'militant lactivists' and reflects on wider parenting culture in the UK and France. Discussing gender, feminism and activism, this study contributes to kinship and family studies by exploring how relatedness is enacted in conjunction to constructions of the self.

The Dance of Nurture

The Dance of Nurture PDF Author: Penny Van Esterik
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1785335634
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Breastfeeding and child feeding at the center of nurturing practices, yet the work of nurture has escaped the scrutiny of medical and social scientists. Anthropology offers a powerful biocultural approach that examines how custom and culture interact to support nurturing practices. Our framework shows how the unique constitutions of mothers and infants regulate each other. The Dance of Nurture integrates ethnography, biology and the political economy of infant feeding into a holistic framework guided by the metaphor of dance. It includes a critique of efforts to improve infant feeding practices globally by UN agencies and advocacy groups concerned with solving global nutrition and health problems.

Sharing Milk

Sharing Milk PDF Author: Carter, Shannon K.
Publisher: Policy Press
ISBN: 1529202094
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
The feeding of human milk to socially and biologically unrelated infants is not a new phenomenon, but the Euroamerican values of individualism have generated expectations that mothers are individually responsible for feeding their own infants. Using a bio-communities of practice framework, this dynamic new analysis explores the emotional and material dimensions of the growing milk sharing practice in the Global North and its implications for contemporary understandings of infant feeding in the US. Ranging widely across themes of motherhood, gender and sociology, this is a compelling empirical account of infant feeding that stimulates new thinking about a contentious practice.

Children’s Healthcare and Parental Media Engagement in Urban China

Children’s Healthcare and Parental Media Engagement in Urban China PDF Author: Qian Gong
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137498773
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
This book analyses parental anxieties about their children’s healthcare issues in urban China, engaging with wider theoretical debates about modernity, risk and anxiety. It examines the broader social, cultural and historical contexts of parental anxiety by analysing a series of socio-economic changes and population policy changes in post-reform China that contextualise parental experiences. Drawing on Wilkinson’s (2001) conceptualisation linking individual’s risk consciousness to anxiety, this book analyses the situated risk experiences of parents’ and grandparents’, looking particularly into their engagement with various types of media. It studies the representations of health issues and health-related risks in a parenting magazine, popular newspapers, commercial advertising and new media, as well as parents’ and grandparents’ engagement with and response to these media representations. By investigating ‘a culture of anxiety’ among parents and grandparents in contemporary China, this book seeks to add to the scholarship of contemporary parenthood in a non- Western context.

Consuming Religion

Consuming Religion PDF Author: Kathryn Lofton
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022648212X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
“Takes us through the Kardashians, cubicle design, and Goldman Sachs, among other phenomena, to reveal the relationship of religion and popular culture.” —Reading Religion What are you drawn to like, to watch, or even to binge? What are you free to consume, and what do you become through consumption? These questions of desire and value, Kathryn Lofton argues, are questions for the study of religion. In eleven essays exploring soap and office cubicles, Britney Spears and the Kardashians, corporate culture and Goldman Sachs, Lofton shows the conceptual levers of religion in thinking about social modes of encounter, use, and longing. Wherever we see people articulate their dreams of and for the world, wherever we see those dreams organized into protocols, images, manuals, and contracts, we glimpse what the word “religion” allows us to describe and understand. With great style and analytical acumen, Lofton offers the ultimate guide to religion and consumption in our capitalizing times. “Consuming Religion is a timely exploration of a world in which reality is branded. Unexpected connections and juxtapositions reveal religion in unexpected places and practices. To follow Kathryn Lofton’s romp through today’s mediascape is to discover the superficiality of pop culture to be surprisingly profound.” —Mark C. Taylor, Columbia University “An elegant, critical, wide-ranging and thought-provoking account of religion and spirituality in America today.” —Times Higher Education

Normative Motherhood:

Normative Motherhood: PDF Author: Andrea O'Reilly
Publisher: Demeter Press
ISBN: 1772584517
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
A central aim of motherhood studies is to examine and theorize normative motherhood. Where does it come from? What are its defining features and demands? How does it work as a regulatory discourse and practice across differences of age, class, race, ability, sexuality, and region? What is the impact of normative motherhood on women' s lives? What does an intersectional analysis of normative motherhood reveal? How is normative motherhood reflected and enacted in public policy, workplace practices, family arrangements and so on? How is normative motherhood represented and resisted in literature, art, photography, and film? How do or may women resist normative motherhood? This collection explores these questions of normative motherhood under three interrelated topics: Regulations, Representations, and Reclamations.

Discourse in the Digital Age

Discourse in the Digital Age PDF Author: Eleonora Esposito
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000982254
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
This collection makes the case for existing critical discourse analysis theory and methods to meaningfully engage with the communicative parameters, power dynamics, and technological affordances of contemporary digital spaces. This book lends a critical focus on discursive practices operating through the paradigm of social media communication, addressing the crucial interface of discourse and the participatory web with disciplinary rigour and a well-balanced focus. This volume features chapters highlighting a diverse range of methods, including multi-sited ethnography, multimodality, argumentation studies, and topic modelling, as applied to a global range of case studies to present a holistic portrait of the latest methodological and theoretical debates in this space. The collection demonstrates the many and pervasive impacts of digital mediation on established discursive practices that are (re-)shaping existing social values, practices, and demands. In so doing, the collection advocates for a new tradition in critical discourse research, one which is rigorous in accounting for both solid discursive frameworks and the evolving complexity of digital platforms, and which triangulates methodologies in order to fully make sense of contemporary discursive practices and power relations on the online–offline continuum. This collection will be of interest to students and scholars in critical discourse studies, digital communication, media studies, and anthropology.

Others' Milk

Others' Milk PDF Author: Kristin J. Wilson
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813593875
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Breastfeeding rarely conforms to the idealized Madonna-and-baby image seen in old artwork, now re-cast in celebrity breastfeeding photo spreads and pro-breastfeeding ad campaigns. The personal accounts in Others’ Milk illustrate just how messy and challenging and unpredictable it can be—an uncomfortable reality in the contemporary context of high-stakes motherhood in which “successful” breastfeeding proves one’s maternal mettle. Exceptional breastfeeders find creative ways to feed and care for their children—such as by inducing lactation, sharing milk, or exclusively pumping. They want to adhere to the societal ideal of giving them “the best” but sometimes have to face off with dogmatic authorities in order to do so. Kristin J. Wilson argues that while breastfeeding is never going to be the feasible choice for everyone, it should be accessible to anyone.

Social and cultural psychoimmunology

Social and cultural psychoimmunology PDF Author: Imre Lazar
Publisher: Editions L'Harmattan
ISBN: 2140311531
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 539

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Book Description
Systems theory, ecologic anthropology, the understanding of humankind and its environment in an organic unit or the interpretation of humankind and its inanimate environment in one unit, as a human/non-human hybrid, all help to understand psychosomatics as a part of human ecology. The disease is a coded message from fate. However, the patient is the protagonist of their fate, and fate is shaped by the dramatics played out on a socio-psychological stage. Disease happens in the body’s evolutionary structure, but this story is locked into the microecology of the inner world and the natural and sociocultural macroecology of existence. It is this eco-logic that creates the context for signals of socio-psychoimmunology. When pursuing the discovery of information on disease events, the neuroendocrine and immunology signals turn into reporting signals, psychoimmunology becomes a multi-dimensional semiotic problem, the evolutionary background of signals turns into etymology, and stress and its consequences become a narrative. Life events are in the center of attention of cultural psychoimmunology and offer an area where the social psychophysiology recognitions observed in the sociocultural atmosphere of a given world and life provide strategic information for psychosomatics and narrative medicine.

Bottled Up

Bottled Up PDF Author: Suzanne Barston
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520270231
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
Discusses the issue of breast feeding and whether it is fair to judge parenting on breast vs. bottle as opposed to making the right choice for a family.