Papers by Michelle Pentecost
Frontiers in Sociology, Medical Sociology, 2020
In this article, we are concerned with the expanded public health interest in the "preconception ... more In this article, we are concerned with the expanded public health interest in the "preconception period" as a window of opportunity for intervention to improve long-term population health outcomes. While definitions of the "preconception period" remain vague, new classifications and categories of life are becoming formalized as biomedicine begins to conduct research on, and suggest intervention in, this undefined and potentially unlimited time before conception. In particular, we focus on the burgeoning epidemiological interest in epigenetics and Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) research as simultaneously a theoretical spyglass into postgenomic biology and a catalyst toward a public health focus on preconception care. We historicize the notion that there are long-term implications of parental behaviors before conception, illustrating how, as Han and Das have noted, "newness comes to be embedded in older forms even as it transforms them" (Han and Das, 2015, p. 2). We then consider how DOHaD frameworks justify a number of fragmented claims about preconception by making novel evidentiary assertions. Engaging with the philosophy of Georges Canguilhem, we examine the relationship between reproductive risk and revised understandings of biological permeability, and discuss some of the epistemic and political implications of emerging claims in postgenomics.
The epigenetic and microbiomic imaginaries that animate public health discourse on perinatal nutr... more The epigenetic and microbiomic imaginaries that animate public health discourse on perinatal nutrition and the infant gut in South Africa offer a case study through which to reconsider the ontological presuppositions of “space” that frame epigenetic biopolitics. We suggest that the mutual constitution of the relations at stake in and around questions of nutrition, mothers and infants, the gut and sanitation in Khayelitsha, can be understood through a Deleuzian geomorphological image of “strata of the political”. Strata are conjunctural entanglements that temporarily stabilise when distinctions hold briefly, and that bring into alignment particular relations and forces that distribute life and non-life. This analytic makes visible and available to political life the spatio-temporal, socio-natural blurring of categories that epigenetic and microbiomic discourses could afford. Grounded ethnographic descriptions of these processes of “mattering” can challenge political epistemologies and take further critical perspectives on space to open up possibilities for a robust postgenomic politics.
Statements on childhood overweight and obesity (COO) have focused on different avenues for preven... more Statements on childhood overweight and obesity (COO) have focused on different avenues for prevention and treatment, critical stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy and lactation, individual, family, school and community-based interventions, multidisciplinary family programmes and multicomponent interventions. This commentary is concerned with the less-addressed relationship between COO and inequality. It describes current global patterns of inequality and COO and the ways in which those inequalities are linked to COO at micro-level, meso-level and macro-level. It then describes current programmatic approaches for COO inequality, preventive and medical, and considers important pitfalls in the framing of the problem of COO and inequality. It ends with describing how childhood and adolescent overweight and obesity prevention and treatment programmes might be formulated within broader socio-political frameworks to influence outcomes.
Pentecost M. 2015. Unit for Biocultural Variation and Obesity Opinion Paper Series, #09, p1-7.
Book Review of Para-States and Medical Science - Making African Global Health, edited by P. Wenze... more Book Review of Para-States and Medical Science - Making African Global Health, edited by P. Wenzel Geissler, Durham, Duke University Press, 2015, 369 pp., £18.99
(paperback), ISBN 0822357496, for New Genetics and Society
South African medical journal = Suid-Afrikaanse tydskrif vir geneeskunde, 2013
Journal of clinical pathology, 2006
Conference Presentations by Michelle Pentecost
DOHaD and epigenetics have growing relevance to the health programs around the world and are a ke... more DOHaD and epigenetics have growing relevance to the health programs around the world and are a key platform in global health initiatives such as the World Health Organisation and United Nations. Issues of nutrition, living and working conditions, environmental exposures, poverty and inequality are key to conceptual understandings of health across the lifecourse and in postgenomic programs such as environmental epigenetics and microbiomics. This panel invites papers that interrogate the ways in which DOHaD and epigenetics intersect with local knowledge and local biologies in the Global South, and the broader politics of governance and biopower that such programs may entail. We envisage themes such as: how DOHaD and epigenetics are translated into cultural practices of reproduction, eating, care and kinship; the uptake of notions of biological plasticity; and how the politics of race, colonialism and violence are imbricated and negotiated in encounters between life science, history and daily lives, particularly in the Global South. These themes are not exhaustive and we welcome other contributions in this field. We are pleased to announce that the call for abstracts to the open panel:
With Thomas Cousins at ASA16: Footprints and futures: the time of anthropology’; annual meeting o... more With Thomas Cousins at ASA16: Footprints and futures: the time of anthropology’; annual meeting of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth, Durham University, 6 July 2016.
Conference paper presented at ‘ASA16: Footprints and futures: the time of anthropology’; annual m... more Conference paper presented at ‘ASA16: Footprints and futures: the time of anthropology’; annual meeting of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth, Durham University, 5 July 2016.
Presented at the 'Humanisation of the Health Sciences' conference, 18 May 2016, Brocher Foundatio... more Presented at the 'Humanisation of the Health Sciences' conference, 18 May 2016, Brocher Foundation, Geneva
Paper presented at the Rank Prize Funds: Mini Symposium on Nutrition and Obesity, Grasmere 19-22 ... more Paper presented at the Rank Prize Funds: Mini Symposium on Nutrition and Obesity, Grasmere 19-22 October 2015.
Presented at Anthropology Southern Africa Conference in Potchefstroom, 1 September 2015.
Anthr... more Presented at Anthropology Southern Africa Conference in Potchefstroom, 1 September 2015.
Anthropological critiques of policy ideologies of mothering and infant feeding describe the worlds otherwise of women and children to reveal how feeding practices - the feeding of children and families, breastfeeding and its alternatives, and the feeding of the fetus in utero - are framed within understandings of risk and responsibility that privilege individual choice and overlook women's disparate resource access and diverse experiences of motherhood. In the epigenetic era, life course epidemiology employs a rhetoric of potential that further alters these configurations to span generations, and positions maternal food practices as a central predictor of future health. A preoccupation with the future is a central tenet of development ideologies, but this is newly formalised by projects, like the 'first thousand days' campaign, that have an explicit lifecycle focus and target measurable outcomes. As Karen Taussig and colleagues have claimed, this 'naming and framing of the future' is always political. This paper draws on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in antenatal clinics and maternal communities in Khayelitsha, South Africa to illuminate this world otherwise of women and their (future) children, and how discourses of risk and potential embedded in novel healthcare packages align with or contest notions of citizenship, responsibility, food and its bearing on the future in this version of the local.
Paper presented on 28.8.14 at 'Medical Humanities in Africa 2014'.
Paper presented on 5.9.13 at WiSER (Wits Institute for Social And Economic research) as part of '... more Paper presented on 5.9.13 at WiSER (Wits Institute for Social And Economic research) as part of 'Body Knowledge: Medicine and the Humanities in Conversation'
Workshops by Michelle Pentecost
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Papers by Michelle Pentecost
(paperback), ISBN 0822357496, for New Genetics and Society
Conference Presentations by Michelle Pentecost
Anthropological critiques of policy ideologies of mothering and infant feeding describe the worlds otherwise of women and children to reveal how feeding practices - the feeding of children and families, breastfeeding and its alternatives, and the feeding of the fetus in utero - are framed within understandings of risk and responsibility that privilege individual choice and overlook women's disparate resource access and diverse experiences of motherhood. In the epigenetic era, life course epidemiology employs a rhetoric of potential that further alters these configurations to span generations, and positions maternal food practices as a central predictor of future health. A preoccupation with the future is a central tenet of development ideologies, but this is newly formalised by projects, like the 'first thousand days' campaign, that have an explicit lifecycle focus and target measurable outcomes. As Karen Taussig and colleagues have claimed, this 'naming and framing of the future' is always political. This paper draws on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in antenatal clinics and maternal communities in Khayelitsha, South Africa to illuminate this world otherwise of women and their (future) children, and how discourses of risk and potential embedded in novel healthcare packages align with or contest notions of citizenship, responsibility, food and its bearing on the future in this version of the local.
Workshops by Michelle Pentecost
(paperback), ISBN 0822357496, for New Genetics and Society
Anthropological critiques of policy ideologies of mothering and infant feeding describe the worlds otherwise of women and children to reveal how feeding practices - the feeding of children and families, breastfeeding and its alternatives, and the feeding of the fetus in utero - are framed within understandings of risk and responsibility that privilege individual choice and overlook women's disparate resource access and diverse experiences of motherhood. In the epigenetic era, life course epidemiology employs a rhetoric of potential that further alters these configurations to span generations, and positions maternal food practices as a central predictor of future health. A preoccupation with the future is a central tenet of development ideologies, but this is newly formalised by projects, like the 'first thousand days' campaign, that have an explicit lifecycle focus and target measurable outcomes. As Karen Taussig and colleagues have claimed, this 'naming and framing of the future' is always political. This paper draws on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in antenatal clinics and maternal communities in Khayelitsha, South Africa to illuminate this world otherwise of women and their (future) children, and how discourses of risk and potential embedded in novel healthcare packages align with or contest notions of citizenship, responsibility, food and its bearing on the future in this version of the local.