Angela Barian
Research
Sociology Links
Research
My research interests:
Sociology of race, class, and gender; sexuality and the body, culture, health
Dissertation: (in progress)
Chewing the Fat: Understanding Discourses of Childhood Obesity
My dissertation investigates the impact of cultural concerns on the framing of a social problem. More specifically:
My question is why and how it is that three different claimsmaking communities – medical, media, and policy – define childhood obesity as a problem fraught with cultural anxieties. The analysis focuses on the claimsmaking communities’ use of language to make sense of the issue. Through this, I show how raced, classed, and gendered concerns are expressed through accounts of the “childhood obesity epidemic.”
To answer the question, I examine concerns over the causes, fallout, and solutions to childhood obesity in American medical research, news media, and policy documents between 2002 and 2009.
So the childhood obesity epidemic is also an issue of values and the democratic determination of how we should intervene - or not - for “the common good. This process raises questions about the appropriate size and scope of the state and other authorities, the desired degree of public intervention in private affairs and for whom, the distribution of power and material goods, and dilemmas of morality and values.
This approach is indicative of my larger orientation towards sociology: to take a social problem that "everyone already knows," and to make larger social relations of gender, race, class, and power available and understandable on a wider scale.
Articles in Progress:
“You Can’t Hate Someone for Her Own Good: The Framingof Child Obesity in Medical Research”
“What Kind of Girl Do You Like? The Sexualized fat Body on Television”
“What is Embodiment?” (with Shamus Khan)
