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Fatness, Obesity, and Disadvantage in the Australian Suburbs pp 1–28Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Introduction

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Abstract

In the introduction, Warin and Zivkovic set the scene for the premise and ethnographic location of the book, and the politics of conducting fieldwork with a community being targeted by a statewide obesity intervention. The book has a dual purpose: exploring community responses to fatness and obesity, and the unfolding politics of research relationships with external partners. Key theoretical tropes that weave throughout the argument are introduced, including the politics of knowledge, the distaste of class, and differing realities of obesity.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    David Mosse (2005), Eben Kirksey (2011), and Emma Kowal (2015) discuss the difficulties of accountability and interpretation they encountered during their ethnographic fieldwork. Employed as an anthropologist-consultant on a British aid development project in rural India, Mosse describes the rupture of relationships he encountered. He details how different actors responded to his analysis—it was “accepted and challenged, endorsed and dismissed, recognised and unrecognised; it has intrigued and depressed, provoked incandescence and been utterly ignored” (2005, p. 14).

  2. 2.

    In all, there were 21 communities involved in OPAL across South Australia, including one community in the Northern Territory (referred to as the Childhood Obesity Prevention and Lifestyle [COPAL] program).

  3. 3.

    Pseudonyms have been used for all research participants and in some cases roles and place names have been changed to further protect anonymity.

  4. 4.

    Rail et al. (2010) make a similar observation when they argue that obesity science relies on “a process that is saturated by ideology and intolerance regarding certain types of evidence, alternative discourses, and non-normative knowledge and ways of knowing (for example, qualitative research)” (Rail et al. 2010, p. 262).

  5. 5.

    https://fattitudethemovie.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/cfp-fsnz2016.pdf Conf on Fat Studies 2016.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia

    Megan Warin & Tanya Zivkovic

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  1. Megan Warin
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Correspondence to Megan Warin .

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Warin, M., Zivkovic, T. (2019). Introduction. In: Fatness, Obesity, and Disadvantage in the Australian Suburbs. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01009-6_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01009-6_1

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