Dr Irmak Karademir-Hazir

This paper explores how the transition to parenthood reshapes foodwork in families by drawing on ethnographic, longitudinal research conducted with parents of young children in the south-east of England. It utilizes the conceptual framework offered by practice theory and unpacks how parents’ interpretations, techniques, and emotions surrounding eating transform as feeding and eating become routinized. The findings demonstrate the profound influence of feeding young children on the perception and practice of commensality at home. Mealtimes are increasingly recognized as crucial moments for transmitting manners and tastes across generations. Moreover, the analysis reveals that caregiving and other practices have a ripple effect on adults' eating practices, leading to changes in their food priorities, meal schedules, practical arrangements, and even the division of labor along gender lines. The findings underline the complexity of implementing institutional advice, for instance on “good” child feeding, as it requires changes in parents’ own food practices and emotional relationships with food. By emphasizing the lived experiences of practitioners, this paper supports the growing call to incorporate identities, such as gender, into practice theoretical analysis, ultimately enhancing our understanding of how practices evolve and endure.

Cultural participation during childhood significantly impacts an individual’s chances of future social mobility and well-being. Research to date has focused disproportionately on adults’ cultural practices, failing to comprehensively examine how children’s cultural participation is formed, structured and linked to their parents’. Drawing upon data from the Taking Part Survey, this article first examines the cultural profiles that emerge in children’s participation in England (including highbrow, eclectic, popular or restricted) and then employs regression techniques to disentangle the effects of parental capital (level of education versus cultural participation profile) on children’s cultural profiles. The analysis provides the greater granularity needed to understand the relative strength and significance of parentally embodied versus institutionalised cultural capital in children’s varying forms of engagement with arts and culture. While the patterns of intergenerational transmission revealed in the study largely confirm the role of institutionalised cultural capital in the reproduction of cultural inequality, they also reveal the significance of parental participation for children’s cultural participation. This highlights the need to approach cultural mobility and arts engagement policies at the household level rather than targeting children individually.

This study unpacks how class processes shape understandings and practices of ‘good feeding’ in families with young children. It brings a Bourdieusian class consumption focus together with food parenting studies and approaches feeding as encompassing a wide range of processes including cooking, shopping, and planning. To capture the lived experience of feeding work, the study draws on a longitudinal and ethnographic study conducted in the south-east of England over the course of two years. The analysis suggests that, regardless of their resources, parents tend to internalise the dominant discourse on ‘healthy’ and varied’ feeding. However, closer inspection of day-to-day practices reveals a nuanced class-cultural patterning in how these terms are defined and achieved. Moreover, it reveals how different interpretations of key notions such as homemade, nutritious, and balanced generate practices that contribute to the cultivation of distinctively classed culinary agencies in children. This study also questions what potential role these understandings can play in reproducing taste hierarchies and maintaining symbolic boundaries from very early ages. 

This article explores the culinary taste repertoires of middle-class people in Turkey who can be defined as omnivores due to their routine engagement with ‘lowbrow’ food spaces. We aim to understand how they make sense of their boundary crossing and the extent to which this indicates tolerance. We find that our culinary omnivores develop interest in traditional food and tend to cross established boundaries between the traditional and modern to maintain a cosmopolitan palette. However, our analysis identifies certain conditions that foster and limit omnivorous practices, such as mealtime, type of occasion and with whom the food is shared, as well as one’s class trajectory, demonstrating how selective people are when they step outside of their original taste profiles. Derogatory comments about the manners of these settings’ original clientele suggest that omnivores continue to perform distinction regardless of their openness to ‘lowbrow’ cultural forms.

En  este  artículo,  nuestro  objetivo  es  utilizar  los conceptos de Bourdieu para comprender la emergencia de un gusto conservador / islámico en el contexto de las recientes transformaciones políticas de Turquía.  Para   hacerlo, primero nos  centraremos  en  las  raíces  históricas  del  fenómeno, la fuerte conexión entre la política y el consumo en Turquía, con el fin de abordar los  impactos  de  la  reciente  transformación  del conservadurismo político en el gusto con-servador.  En  segundo  lugar,  describimos  la  forma  actual  del  gusto  conservador  conven-cional como la elección de un estilo elegante y religioso, a través del análisis de contenido de tres revistas de moda conservadoras. Por último, recurriendo  a  una  investigación  de  campo  realizada  en  Ankara,  presentamos  ejemplos  concretos de cómo se incorpora el gusto con-servador y se utiliza para realizar la distinción de  clase  dentro  y  más  allá  de  las  fracciones  conservadoras de la sociedad.

[= In this paper, we aim to use Bourdieusian concepts to understand the rise of conservative/Islamic taste in the context of Turkey’s recent political transformations. To do so, we first focus on the historical roots of the strong connection between politics and consumption in Turkey by addressing the impacts of recent transformation of political conservatism on conservative taste. Second, we describe the current form of the conservative middlebrow taste as the choice of elegant and religiously proper through the content analysis of three conservative fashion magazines. Lastly, drawing on a field research conducted in Ankara, we present concrete examples of how conservative taste is embodied and used to perform class distinction within and beyond the conservative fractions.]

Broad changes taking place in the fashion scene are argued to blur social class distinctions and render class emulation theses less relevant to explain the dynamics of clothing consumption. Critically engaging with this literature, and drawing from Bourdieu, Goffman, and recent feminist literature on the formation of classed femininities, this article explores the extent to which women’s narratives of good taste in clothing are structured by class processes. It utilizes in-depth interviews conducted with Turkish women, covered and not covered, on how they engage with the consumption domains in which bodies are shaped and adorned. The literature on self-fashioning in Turkey tends to focus on a quite over-emphasized and politicized dichotomy between pious and secular embodiment styles, ignoring the sociologically meaningful heterogeneity that exists within each. This article, however, demonstrates how class and cultural capital cross-cuts such distinctions and generates distinct understandings of age appropriateness, public-private sphere distinction, suitability of social context and body shape, and ‘naturalness’, shared across women who have different proximities to Islamic lifestyle. This article contributes to clothing consumption and fashion studies by showing the ways in which social class continues to generate embodied femininities with unequal symbolic values, despite the so-called ‘democratization’ trends in fashion, even in a context like Turkey where other significant religio-political divisions are in play.

Recent scholarship has argued that the concept of highbrow culture is undergoing radical changes, both in content and modes of appropriation. We introduce a new layer to this debate by bringing to the fore the format of the cultural product, distinguishing between “live” cultural products (concerts, exhibitions, live shows) and “recordings” (distributable items such as books or music albums). Using culture sections of newspapers (The Guardian, Le Monde, ABC, El País, Helsingin Sanomat, Dagens Nyheter) from 1960 to 2010 (n=11,775) we ask what role the format of the cultural product plays for the highbrow/non-highbrow trajectories over time. We show that highbrow coverage faces a relative decline, mostly explained by the expanding non-highbrow arts coverage. Moreover, coverage on live events decreases, while coverage of recordings grows. This trend reflects the highbrow/non-highbrow divide, revealing that the “decline of the highbrow” phenomenon is under closer scrutiny a “decline of the highbrow live event”.