Food abuse : Mealtimes, helplines and 'troubled' eating

Feeding children can be one of the most challenging and frustrating aspects of raising a family. This is often exacerbated by conflicting guidelines over what the ‘correct’ amount of food and ‘proper’ eating actually entails. The issue becomes muddier still when parents are accused of mistreating their children by not feeding them properly, or when eating becomes troubled in some way. Yet how are parents to ‘know’ how much food is enough and when their child is ‘full’? How is food negotiated on a daily level? In this chapter, we show how discursive psychology can provide a way of understanding these issues that goes beyond guidelines and measurements. It enables us to examine the practices within which food is negotiated and used to hold others accountable. Like the other chapters in this section of the book, eating practices can also be situations in which an asymmetry of competence is produced; where one party is treated as being a less-than-valid person (in the case of family practices, this is often the child). As we shall see later, the asymmetry can also be reversed, where one person (adult or child) can claim to have greater ‘access’ to concepts such as ‘appetite’ and ‘hunger’. Not only does this help us to understand the complexity of eating practices; it also highlights features of the parent/child relationshipi and the institutionality of families

Managing the Moral Implications of Advice in Informal Interaction

What does advice giving look like among family members? Most conversation analytic research on advice has been in institutional settings, which constrain what speakers can do. Here we analyze advice in the apparently freer environment of telephone calls between mothers and their young adult daughters. We concentrate on how the advice is received. Our analysis shows that the position of “advice recipient” is a potentially unwelcome identity to occupy because it implies one knows less than the advice giver and indeed that one may be somehow at fault. Advice can be resisted, but choosing to do so seems to depend on what the interactional costs would be. We discuss the implications for studying advice and promoting advice acceptance as well as the way relationality more generally can be constituted in talk

Freedom And Receptivity In Aesthetic Experience

No-one can read far into our subject without finding an author linking aesthetic experience and freedom in one sense or another: Kant, notably of course, but also Schopenhauer, Schiller, and many more. In this article I want first [A] to remind you in a sentence or two of those by now classic ways of connecting concepts of freedom and aesthetic experience, and then [B] to outline some thoughts of my own. Section [C] opens up in more detail a less frequented and less well-charted topic: basically, the many- layered nature of much aesthetic experience, and how that can involve freedom in an ‘improvisatory’ contribution by the apprec iator. Each layer can be thought of as containing a ‘given’—the product of earlier syntheses, plus a new component, in its turn, to be synthesized, whether historical, scientific, religious, or other. This probably occurs most of all in the aesthetic appreciation of nature, since art offers some controlling, ‘mastering’ of the appreciator’s response