Shut Up Fish Face! Encountering Sociological and Biological Entanglements Over Schooled Food and Bodies

• In Event: 28.090 - MTCC Roundtable Session Nine
  In Roundtable Session: 28.090-1 - Biosocial Futures: The Policy Implications of the Life Sciences in Education

Abstract

Objectives: This paper explores the intersection of critical sociological research into the force of food and health policy in education and metabolomics and nutritional research into the enduring impact of nutrition at cellular and molecular levels. The purpose of this paper is to consider whether it is possible to pause, momentarily, our critical analyses of biosocial policy tendencies and the bio-rationalities and bio-politics that these engender (Gulson and Webb, 2016), and instead explore the potentially beneficial productive forces of an encounter between the life and social sciences in education (Youdell, 2017).

Perspective(s): The paper is underpinned by a Deleuzian understanding (Deleuze and Guattari, 2008) of assemblage and a Baradian understanding (Barad, 2007) of intra-action, framings that alert us to the ways that phenomena are produced through the entanglements of multiple forces – including social, psychological and biological forces. This interdisciplinary approach accepts Wilson’s (2013) analysis that such work is necessarily disruptive of disciplinary knowledge and methodologies and takes up Malabou’s (2009) suggestion that it leads to the metamorphosis of concepts – here e.g. health, nutrition, learning, bio-rationality.

Techniques: The paper works at the intersection of critical sociological concerns with policy, institutional and pedagogic forms that constitute healthy and unhealthy learner bodies (Wright and Halse, 2014; Rich et al., 2011) and metabolomic and nutritional research in the biosciences (Calder and Lindley, 2015). We focus in on Omega-3 fish oil, a source of ‘essential’ fatty acid that is an integral component of the cellular membrane structure/function (Calder, 2014; Mickleborough and Lindley, 2013). While there has been a degree of popular interest in the potential benefits to children’s learning of Omega-3 as well as some supplementation trials in education (Kirby et al., 2010), the results of which remain equivocal. Furthermore, to date, none have located findings in a broader critical interrogation of the productive force of health-related policy and practices in schools.

Data Sources: The paper draws on original bio-molecular data of the metabolic effects of dietary supplementation with Omega-3 fish oil (Kumar et al., 2016); extant statistical data on the effects of supplementation in school children (Kirby et al., 2010); extant observational data on the effects of prevailing health pedagogies in education (Leahy, 2009) and extant analysis of the potentialities of biosocial analyses (Youdell and Lindley, forthcoming).

Results and Scholarly Significance: Integrating these diverse data sources, we offer an analysis of the simultaneously biological and social forces of food in school, and make a case for a biosocial approach that is able to recognise the healthy/unhealthy bodies of schooling as at once biologically and socially made and in which food interventions might both improve the molecular functioning of cells and generate hierarchies of bodies that have exclusionary social and educational effects. This is highly important as it demonstrates the crucial need to understand and engage bio-politics and bio-processes even and especially as their research findings cleave across each other (Wilson, 2013).

Authors

• Deborah C. Youdell, University of Birmingham

• Martin Lindley, Loughborough University