Archive for the ‘Consumer behaviour’ Category

Would you believe that one would invest years of time and energy to study an older economics writer in the hope to get the Nobel Prize? Well, that sounds pretty unlikely… Everyone in the history of economics community complains that the field is so disregarded these days. The Nobel prize, don’t even think about it. […]


The Annual Conference of the British Sociological Association (BSA), on “60 years of sociology”, which I attended this week at the London School of Economics, is now over. A very nice experience -I appreciated the quality of the presentations, both in parallel and plenary sessions, and the organisation which was impeccable. I also felt reassured […]


I gave my presentation on Wednesday at the ongoing annual conference of the British Sociological Association at LSE, London -great experience! My presentation was in one of the sessions of the Medicine, Health and Illness stream and followed a panel on Telemedicine. Largely by coincidence, it fitted pretty well with the other presentations and the […]


Uncivil Bodies

10Dec10

‘Uncivil Bodies: New Perspectives and Transdisciplinary Approaches to Eating Disorders’, is a transdisciplinary project about eating behaviours, eating disorders and how they are changing in response to today’s social, cultural, and economic transformations. It is the result of my collaboration with writer and performer Caroline Smith, a colleague at the University of Greenwich, whose practice-based […]


Yesterday, a gave a talk on “Studying eating disorders in the social web: A network analysis approach” at the University of Oxford,as part of a seminar series on social network analysis organised by Nuffield College and the Oxford Internet Institute. Wonderful place, peaceful and relaxing atmosphere, conducive to thinking and reflecting. Nice people, constructive comments, […]


I used to interpret the growing field of research in the economics of food choice and obesity as mirroring a tension between two opposite perspectives. Traditional economics explains the current obesity “epidemics”, as some would have it, based on changing trends in food prices; the blame is put on the lower costs and greater availability […]


I have already written on the topic of obesity and social networks and here, I get back to the topic based on materials I prepared for a reading group meeting last Friday at the University of Greenwich. I had asked participants to read in advance the well-known article by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler (CF): […]


In a new post, author Anne Mai Bertelsen claims that greater availability of data and visualisation tools  may greatly contribute to the fight against hunger which -despite common misperceptions- still afflicts parts of the USA and  in fact parallels the recent rise in obesity. Combining different data sources and enabling access to powerful visualisation tools, […]


Antonio A. Casilli posted “Are social media deepening nutritional inequalities?” yesterday night. The post is about the launch of a joint initiative by CNN’s food blog Eatocracy and the location-based social networking service Foursquare. The idea is to support healthy eating by enabling users to check in local farmers markets and unlock  “Healthy Eater” badges. […]


My colleague Caroline Smith (aka Mertle), performance artist and Lecturer at the University of Greenwich, is now running a “Bedtime Eating Secrets” event at the Brickhouse in the East End. This will feed into a developing research project we are doing together at Greenwich. She invites all those with a secret on eating to participate […]



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