The researchers who make up the Eating Bodies team, and the questions they bring to food, health and bodily practice.
The network is associated with the University of Amsterdam and works across anthropology, science and technology studies, and biology. Its members study metabolism, obesity, care practices, epigenetics and multispecies interactions.
Profiles of researchers and members involved in the network.
Researcher
Author of The Weight of Obesity, launched with the network on 18 April 2016. Her work on kinship, feeding practices and metabolic illness in Xela, Guatemala appears in the publication Bodily Betrayal: Love and Anger in the Time of Epigenetics.
Researcher
Defended her PhD thesis, Subjects of care: Living with overweight in the Netherlands, on 6 October 2016. The thesis draws on an ethnographic study of care practices and questions calls for bodily discipline and healthy choices.
The commensals page gathers the people behind the network, treating the researchers themselves as part of the ecology of eating bodies. Here the focus shifts from food as an object to the relations that gather around it: the questions members bring to meals, to health, and to everyday bodily practice. Profiles introduce scholars whose work moves between anthropology, science and technology studies, and biology, showing how a shared curiosity about metabolism, care, and multispecies life becomes a working conversation rather than a single discipline. The tone is deliberately plain, letting the questions speak for themselves.
Members of the network approach eating as something that never happens alone. Feeding practices tie bodies to kin, to institutions, to plants and microbes, and to the norms that quietly shape what counts as a good meal or a healthy weight. Researchers studying obesity, treatment, and disease ask how categories travel between clinics, laboratories, and kitchens, and how people live with them in ordinary ways. The page holds these threads together, presenting each member's interests as an entry point into a larger shared inquiry about how bodies are made and remade through what they take in.
What connects the group is a way of knowing that stays close to practice. Sensory experience, tasting, socializing, and the labor of processing food all count as forms of knowledge, not background to it. Several members work through ethnography and laboratory experiments alike, following how technologies of sensing and representation shape what can be noticed about a body at all. Temporalities and topologies appear here too, as ways of asking how eating bodies stretch across time and place, from the metabolism of a single person to the wider arrangements of water, land, and supply that feed them.
The network also keeps an eye on the harder edges of its topic. Growth, extraction, and conflict over land and water sit alongside care and commensality, and the group does not separate the nourishing from the destructive. Wasting, valuing, and the equivocations that arise when different worlds meet are treated as part of the same field of study. In this sense the commensals are not only colleagues but companions at a table, sharing questions about how eating bodies are sustained, measured, and cared for, and inviting readers to join that ongoing work.
Researcher
Organised the STS reading club, a group run by members of the Eating Bodies team reading texts in science and technology studies with a focus on ANT and material semiotics. Contact for network inquiries.
Researcher
Member of the Eating Bodies team, contributing to the network's work on eating, metabolism and health.
Guest researcher
Short-term guest of the team, speaking at the Japanese Scholars Afternoon on 29 February 2016 on care in a high-tech laboratory in Japan.
Guest researcher
Short-term guest of the team, speaking at the Japanese Scholars Afternoon on 29 February 2016 on tuberculosis in Ghana.
Guest researcher
Short-term guest of the team, speaking at the Japanese Scholars Afternoon on 29 February 2016 on (anti)corruption in India.
Recurring concerns across the team's work.
How bodies are measured, valued and cared for in relation to food, weight and metabolic illness.
Ethnographic attention to the everyday work of caring for bodies, and to the norms that shape it.
How epigenetic discourses and quantitative health technologies enter women's understandings of food and reproduction.
Eating as a relation among species, explored through the network's workshops and reading.
Publications by team members are collected in the Library. Gatherings, workshops and reading club meetings are listed under Past Events and Past Events.