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

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• risk
• riskscape
• mothering
• weaning
• public health

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for valuable and constructive critique and Professor Peter Jackson, Professor Bente Halkier, Professor Jonathan Everts and the FOCAS-group for discussions and comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. All names of the respondents are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

This work is part of the “Food, convenience and sustainability” (FOCAS) project, which is included in the ERA-Net SUSFOOD Programme (2014–2017). FOCAS is a collaboration between researchers in Great Britain, Denmark, The Netherlands and Sweden (www.sheffield.ac.uk/focas). The Swedish part of the project is funded by The Swedish Research Council FORMAS (grant no 222-2014-50)