Archive for the 'Conference' Category

We are pleased to announce Joan Wolf as a plenary speaker for the 2012 Health, Wellness and Society Conference, Chicago, IL, USA 10-11 March.

Joan Wolf received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago and is currently Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies Texas A&M University.  Her research focuses on the construction of “expert” discourses and how they are transmitted to the public.  She is the author of Harnessing the Holocaust: The Politics of Memory in France (Stanford University Press 2004) and most recently Is Breast Best? Taking on the Breastfeeding Experts and the New High Stakes of Motherhood (New York University Press 2011), in which she argues that the questions infant-feeding scientists ask, the strategies they use to answer them, and the ensuing discussion of results among scientists and between scientists and the public are all shaped by a cultural preoccupation with risk, particularly health risks, and an increasingly comprehensive understanding of what mothers can and should provide their children.  She also demonstrates how public health campaigns and advocacy groups have relied on flawed infant-feeding research, an ethic of “total motherhood,” and widespread popular misunderstanding of risk to exaggerate health risks associated with using infant formula.  Her current research examines how routines in social science research converge with ideas about risk and total motherhood in academic and popular debates about childcare and child development. In 2013, she will be Visiting Fellow at the Center for Parenting Culture Studies in the School of Social Policy, Sociology, and Social Research, University of Kent.

To read about all our plenary speakers please visit the following link.