Else Vogel

• PhD
• Assistant Professor at University of Amsterdam

Much current work in Science and Technology Studies inflects knowing with care. Analyses of the ethos of objectivity, and of the practices by which objectivity is crafted, have shown that knowing and caring cannot be thought apart from each other. Using case studies from our own work we analyse how, in the sociotechnical relationships that we study...

Experimenting with Ethnography collects twenty-one essays that open new paths for doing ethnographic analysis. The contributors—who come from a variety of intellectual and methodological traditions—enliven analysis by refusing to take it as an abstract, disembodied exercise. Rather, they frame it as a concrete mode of action and a creative practice...

‘Our friends have been suggesting for quite a long time that we visit this wonderful city. […] They have a famous cathedral there, Salisbury Cathedral. […] It's famous for its clock. It's one of the oldest working clocks in the world.’ These words are from an interview with two Russian men on Russian state television news (Russia Today, RT) on 7 Ma...

Drawing on Critical Policy Studies and feminist STS, this article conceptualizes obesity prevention activities as ongoing and precarious practices of relating – rather than as means for ‘getting results’ or vehicles through which normative discourses are instilled. It focuses on ‘community approaches’ within public health, whose aim is to stimulate...

In this article, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Netherlands, I explore how weight management practices adapt scientific knowledge to the pragmatics of daily life. I contrast two ‘metabolic logics’: one premises calculating food and exercise to ensure energy balance; the other, operating as a critique to the first, puts its hope in activat...

In this article, I describe the processes through which patients diagnosed with ‘morbid obesity’ become active subjects through undergoing obesity surgery and an empowerment lifestyle programme in a Dutch obesity clinic. Following work in actor-network theory and material semiotics that complicates the distinction between active and passive subject...

Drawing on participant observation in a ‘mindful weight loss’ course offered in the Netherlands, this paper explores the normative register through which mindfulness techniques cast people in relation to concerns with overeating and body weight. The women seeking out mindfulness use eating to cope with troubles in their lives and are hindered by a...

Public debate about who or what is to blame for the rising rates of obesity and overweight shifts between two extreme opinions. The first posits overweight as the result of a lack of individual will, the second as the outcome of bodily drives, potentially triggered by the environment. Even though apparently clashing, these positions are in fact two...

Does healthy eating require people to control themselves and abstain from pleasure? This idea is dominant, but in our studies of dieting in The Netherlands we encountered professionals who work in other ways. They encourage their clients to enjoy their food, as only such joy provides satisfaction and the sense that one has eaten enough. Enjoying on...