‘Healthy’ Food Practices: Going beyond Structure versus Agency
This special issue of Health Sociology Review explores the interconnection of food and health through the lens of social practice.
Key dates:
Submit abstracts by
23rd November 2024 to
HSR.foodpractices@rmit.edu.au
Decisions sent by 20th January 2025
Submit full papers by 28th April 2025
Special issue publication in March 2026
About the Special Issue:
Our interactions with food are critical to physical health, psychological health, social health, spiritual health, environmental health, among many others. How we grow food, produce and manufacture it, how it is provisioned, and how we consume and digest it, celebrate and mourn over it, play with and feel anxious about it, as well as discard it, indicates complex relationships between self and society. Despite being inextricably connected, most discussions about food within sociology are siloed, focusing either on the structural factors that shape our food practices, or our personal choices and their consequences. This has limited how we understand the role of food practices – or the bridging of or going beyond structure and agency – in shaping people’s health and wellbeing.
This special issue advances a holistic focus on food in health sociology, using a theoretical lens that goes beyond structure versus agency in explaining food practices. Influenced by the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1977), and more recently, Ted Schatzki (2002), Andrew Reckwitz (2002), Elizabeth Shove (Shove 2010, Shove Pantzar et al. 2012) and Alan Warde (2005, 2013), social practice theory broadly refers to our everyday practices, and their interconnectedness with time, space, materials and bodies, as sites of change. In academic discourses on food and health, social practice theory has the potential to not only unite our different relationships with food and health, but also connect them with the visceral and embodied aspects of food to illuminate health inequalities and outcomes.
In this special issue, we invite articles that draw on theories of social practice in relation to health across the food system. Ideally, we are interested in articles that adopt an interdisciplinary and/or transdisciplinary lens to understanding food and health using social practice theory. We are also looking for novel approaches and alliances that embrace theoretical and methodological pluralism to advance food and health research beyond its current silos.
If you’re unsure about the appropriateness of your submission, please contact the guest editors,
Dr Natalie Jovanovski and
Dr Bhavna Middha, on
HSR.foodpractices@rmit.edu.au.
References:
Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge University Press.
Reckwitz, A. (2002). "Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorizing." European Journal of Social Theory 5(2): 243-263.Schatzki, T. (2002). The Site of the Social: A philosophical account of the constitution of social life and change. Pennsylvania, Penn State Press.
Shove, E. (2010). "Beyond the ABC: climate change policy and theories of social change." Environment and Planning A 42(6): 1273-1285.
Shove, E., M. Pantzar and M. Watson (2012). The dynamics of social practice: Everyday life and how it changes. London, Sage Publications Limited.
Warde, A. (2005). "Consumption and Theories of Practice." Journal of Consumer Culture 5(2): 131-153.
Warde, A. (2013). What sort of a practice is eating? Sustainable practices, Routledge: 17-29.