Fatness, Obesity, and Disadvantage in the Australian Suburbs: Unpalatable Politics

by Megan Warin (Author), Megan Warin (Author), Tanya Zivkovic (Author)

New
Hardcover
2019
$97.51

Obesity is one of those things that everyone seems to have an opinion about. In high-income countries (US, Australia, UK, Canada) there is ample evidence about the number of people who are overweight or obese, and an abundance of information about what and how to eat. Despite all this information, obesity remains `a problem'. Rather than rely on common assumptions that people are making all the wrong choices, this ethnography takes the reader into the Australian suburbs to learn about food, eating and bodies when times are tough. In a highly political context of one of Australia's largest childhood obesity interventions, we reveal the challenges of `eating healthily' when money is scarce, and the ways in which different versions of being fat and doing fat happen in everyday worlds of precarity. Without acknowledgement of the multiple realities of fatness and obesity, interventions will continue to have limited reach.

Synopsis

Obesity is one of those things that everyone seems to have an opinion about. In high-income countries (US, Australia, UK, Canada) there is ample evidence about the number of people who are overweight or obese, and an abundance of information about what and how to eat. Despite all this information, obesity remains `a problem'. Rather than rely on common assumptions that people are making all the wrong choices, this ethnography takes the reader into the Australian suburbs to learn about food, eating and bodies when times are tough. In a highly political context of one of Australia's largest childhood obesity interventions, we reveal the challenges of `eating healthily' when money is scarce, and the ways in which different versions of being fat and doing fat happen in everyday worlds of precarity. Without acknowledgement of the multiple realities of fatness and obesity, interventions will continue to have limited reach.

$97.51

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20+ in stock

More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 241
Edition: 1st ed. 2019
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 25 Mar 2019
ISBN 10: 3030010082
ISBN 13: 9783030010089

Author Bio

Megan Warin PhD is a social anthropologist and an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow at the University of Adelaide, Australia. She is the author of Abject Relations: Everyday Worlds of Anorexia (2010) Cambridge Studies in Medical Anthropology, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.

Tanya Zivkovic PhD, is a social anthropologist who holds an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award at the University of Adelaide, Australia. Tanya's book Death and Reincarnation in Tibetan Buddhism: In-Between Bodies was published in the Routledge Critical Studies in Buddhism Series in 2014.