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Research has highlighted damaging contradictions in the responsibilisation of mothers over children’s health, at once held responsible for tackling ‘childhood obesity’ while being cautious not to encourage children to become obsessive with their bodies. While research has highlighted discourses of mother blame and elucidated mothers' experiences, less is known about how mothers negotiate discourse in their voiced accounts. Utilising Feminist Relational Discourse Analysis, this study analysed interviews with 12 mothers in England to explore their experiences of a nationally mandated BMI screening programme in schools and explore how discourses shape their voices and stories. In negotiating complex and contradictory discourses of motherhood and fatness, participants expressed a 'duty to protect' their children from both fatphobia and fatness. While tackling the 'obesity epidemic' was framed as a shared moral duty of all parents, mothers felt that the duty to protect children from the harm of fatphobia is a private and personal struggle that they need to endure alone. Negotiating these responsibilities left mothers feeling guilt at their personal ‘failure’ to protect their children from one or both harms. This analysis calls attention to how dominant discourses impact mothers and serve to personally responsibilise them for the harm caused by state-sanctioned fatphobia.

Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) viruses of the H5 A/goose/Guangdong/1/96 lineage can cause severe disease in poultry and wild birds, and occasionally in humans. In recent years, H5 HPAI viruses of this lineage infecting poultry in Asia have spilled over into wild birds and spread via bird migration to countries in Europe, Africa, and North America. In 2016/2017, this spillover resulted in the largest HPAI epidemic on record in Europe and was associated with an unusually high frequency of reassortments between H5 HPAI viruses and cocirculating low-pathogenic avian influenza viruses. Here, we show that the seven main H5 reassortant viruses had various combinations of gene segments 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6. Using detailed time-resolved phylogenetic analysis, most of these gene segments likely originated from wild birds and at dates and locations that corresponded to their hosts' migratory cycles. However, some gene segments in two reassortant viruses likely originated from domestic anseriforms, either in spring 2016 in east China or in autumn 2016 in central Europe. Our results demonstrate that, in addition to domestic anseriforms in Asia, both migratory wild birds and domestic anseriforms in Europe are relevant sources of gene segments for recent reassortant H5 HPAI viruses. The ease with which these H5 HPAI viruses reassort, in combination with repeated spillovers of H5 HPAI viruses into wild birds, increases the risk of emergence of a reassortant virus that persists in wild bird populations yet remains highly pathogenic for poultry.

Following on from the previous chapter, this chapter reviews social psychological and sociological work that has sought to unpick how culturally shared ideology produces classed identities to discriminate and minimise the space for collective, class-based resistance. In detail, we will argue that socially-located derogatory discourses are commonly reproduced in everyday life, how explicit discourse in relation to social class is often unavailable or avoided and how such socially produced classism can produce an uncomfortable emotional realm. Despite this, we will review empirical research that has demonstrated how working-class people sometimes can and do negotiate more positive identity positions for themselves and each other in a variety of everyday contexts and situations.

This chapter aims, first, to scrutinise contemporary research and theory within mainstream psychology around social class and, second, to analyse the interrelationship with this and the history of the psychology of social class. We will identify a selection of ways in which the discipline of psychology has researched, theorised and practiced social class and how these have accounted for where we are now. We will also consider arguments that the ‘psy’ disciplines have a ‘horrible’ history where psychological accounts have enabled notions of class oppression, poverty and inequality to be an ‘absent present’. Last, we will review some examples of mainstream psychological work on social class that has questioned social conditions and practices and explore how these may contribute to class-related psychologies.

Recent‘ obesity’ preventions focus heavily on children, widely regarded as the future of society. The National Child Measurement Programme (NCMP) is a flagship government programme in England that annually measures the Body Mass Index (BMI) of children in Reception (aged 4–5) and Year 6 (aged 10 –11) in order to identify ‘at risk’ children and offer advice to parents. Using Foucauldian discourse analysis this study explore show discourses within the programme construct fatness. The NCMP materials contain three key interrelated themes (concerning the hidden threat of ‘obesity’, the burden of ‘obesity’, and bodies that pose a greater risk) that combine to construct a ‘grotesque discourse’ of apocalyptic public health. ‘Obesity’ is constructed as a social and economic catastrophe where certain bodies pose a greater threat than others. We argue that this discourse has the potential to change health service policy in markedly regressive ways that will disproportionately impact working-class, Black, Asian, and mixed race families.