Co-eating: A new theoretical perspective on children's eating practices

Eating together is one of the first social activities that infants engage in and yet very little is known about the details of children's eating practices in real-life settings.

The field of eating research has been hampered by a paradigm that prioritises individual cognitions and behaviour, and methods that have restricted our understanding of eating to that which fit into an experimental framework.

This sabbatical project will advance this field by developing an alternative theoretical framework that places interaction and social practices at the centre of eating practices.

The overarching purpose is to advance the field of children's eating practices both theoretically and methodologically, and to stimulate interdisciplinary collaboration in a field that has been hampered by disciplinary fragmentation.

The sabbatical period will be used to complete remaining analysis of an existing data corpus and write a monograph that synthesises this body of work and proposes a new theoretical perspective on children's eating practices.

The two research visits will enable analyses of the data in important new directions and lay the foundations for an emerging network of researchers in eating interactions.