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Maria Fuentes.

Maria Fuentes

Senior lecturer, associate professor

Maria Fuentes.

The construction and navigation of riskscapes in public health advice and mothers’ accounts of weaning

Author

  • Maria Fuentes
  • Helene Brembeck

Summary, in English

This paper adds to critical studies of risk and mothering by illustrating and conceptualising how risk is constructed in public health advice and mothers’ accounts of weaning. Previous research points towards a gap between public health scientific definitions of risk and mothers’ contextual understandings and experience of handling complex and often conflicting risks linked to food and feeding. It has been suggested that public health discourse misses out on or even silences risks defined by women in their everyday care practices. Therefore, our aim is to conceptualise and map various co-existing constructions of risk and discuss how an awareness of the multiplicity of risk can inform public health advice that take mothers’ point of view into account. Using the concept ‘riskscape’, we explore and compare how public health and mothers’ constructions of risk diverge and overlap. Our findings illustrate how mothers belong to a community of practice where weaning is understood and practiced in relation to their everyday life and eating practices involving multiple concerns that are not addressed in public health advice, especially the wider food and information landscape. The study also indicate that this divergence can provoke feelings of insecurity and anxiety among mothers and make public health advice seem less relevant. In sum, our findings suggest a need for public health to acknowledge mothers’ experience of weaning as a compound practice similar to their own eating practices and to widen the present focus on risk as a domestic and individual responsibility.

Department/s

  • Department of Service Studies

Publishing year

2019

Language

English

Pages

227-245

Publication/Series

Health, Risk and Society

Volume

21

Issue

5-6

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Topic

  • Social Sciences Interdisciplinary
  • Health Care Service and Management, Health Policy and Services and Health Economy

Keywords

  • mothering
  • public health
  • risk
  • riskscape
  • weaning

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1369-8575