 | Cristina Hanganu-Bresch Associate Professor - St. Joseph University Bioethics - Medical ethics |
-
03.08.2022-29.08.2022
Appifying Food: Food trackers and Our Digital Health
To assess the role of food/diet tracking apps play in the users’ sense of citizenship, self-perception of health, and perceived responsibility for their own health.
To determine whether these apps reframe our attitudes towards food, and whether they can exacerbate obsessive or orthorexic tendencies, thus belying their original purpose.
To determine whether the social component of these apps, where present, plays a role in their usage and overall effects.To synthesize a literature review, analyze data collected from focus groups, and produce a full draft of an article on this issue for one of the following possible target journals: Health and Society, Health Culture and Society, or Digital Health.
-
02.07.2018-29.08.2018
Eating Right: Between obsession and ethics. Culture wars around orthorexia and veganism
I would like to use my stay at Brocher to revise and refine at least two chapters from a proposed book on orthorexia. I'm interested in the intersection of orthorexia, healthism, and neoliberalism broadly construed, and the construction of the orthorexic subject as a perpetual project (Han) caught in the consumerist ideology of self-improvement. Central to the book is a discussion of the tension between eating right from an ethical vegan/vegetarian point of view and eating right from a healthist point of view.
I am an Associate Professor in Writing and Rhetoric at the University of the Sciences, a small health-science oriented university in Philadelphia (specializing in pharmacy, physical and occupational therapy, biology, and chemistry-related fields). Full disclosure: my field is rhetoric/ rhetoric of health and medicine, which, in this context, seems most closely related to science and technology studies. I have published on issues related to the history and rhetoric of psychiatry in particular. For my current project I am focusing on the discursive construction of orthorexia as a new "cyberchondria" at the nexus of healthism, consummerism, and biopoliticized bodies.
Previous