A joint initiative between the University of Bergen
and CMI – Chr. Michelsen Institute
Welcome to a seminar on the intersection of food and family intervention policies in England.
Photo: Colourbox, Marian Vejcik In England, during the late 1990s, there was a focus on supporting ‘troubled families’ through policy interventions. Early years settings became key places to implement these policies, aiming to address perceived household deficiencies. This led to an overlap between early years education and family intervention. Children’s food policy emerged as an especially fruitful area for intervention, where the aim of ‘improving children’s diets’ seems to be interlaced with a concern for ‘improving parenting styles’.
Francesca Vaghi explores the intersection of food and family interventions. How can particular framings of policy problems – and their solutions – lead to contradictions and arbitrary results? She also discusses how children’s perspectives can be included in meaningful ways when developing interventions.
The seminar is part of the RDV series, a collaboration between the Centre for Research on Discretion and Paternalism and the Centre on Law and Social Transformation at the University of Bergen. The RDV-webinar series is an interdisciplinary webinar where national and international researchers are invited to talk about their pioneering research on topics regarding law, democracy, and welfare.
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Francesca Vaghi is a Research Associate at the School of Social & Political Science at the University of Glasgow. She is interested in medical anthropology, the anthropology of policy, and childhood studies.
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Francesca Vaghi is a Research Associate at the School of Social & Political Science at the University of Glasgow. She is interested in medical anthropology, the anthropology of policy, and childhood studies.
Francesca is currently conducting research on the work of contemporary NHS charities as part of the Border Crossings project.
She completed her PhD in 2019 at SOAS, University of London. For her doctoral research, Francesca conducted ethnographic fieldwork in a state-maintained nursery in London over a 12-month period, developing a child-centred methodological approach to meaningfully involve children in research. Aside from investigating how children create self and peer identities through food and eating practices, her work explores how children’s food policy fits into family intervention policies in the context of Britain’s mixed economy of welfare, and how notions of ‘good food’ and ‘good parenting’ (particularly mothering) are interlinked. Her book, Food Policy and Practice in Early Childhood Education and Care, has just been published by Routledge.
Francesca is interested in advancing critical approaches in public health, specifically looking at how dominant policy discourses (re)create and seek to address ‘problems’ that have particular implications for working class and ethnic minority families, particularly in matters related to food insecurity, childhood poverty, and childcare policy.
Bergen Global is a joint initiative between the University of Bergen and Chr. Michelsen Institute that addresses global challenges.
