Gender,feminism and food studies

Policy research and scholarship on food has rapidly increased in recent decades. The attention to ‘gender' within this work appears to signal important practical and academic efforts to mainstream gendered understandings of food consumption, distribution and production into expansive conceptualisations of human security. This article argues that the gender-related work on food has wide-ranging and often troubling political and theoretical foundations and implications. Often growing out of knowledge regimes for managing social crises and advancing neo-liberal solutions, much gender and food security work provides limited interventions into mainstream gender-blind work on the nexus of power struggles, food resources and globalisation. A careful analysis of knowledge production about gender and food is therefore crucial to understanding how and why feminist food studies often transcends and challenges dominant forms of scholarship and research on food security. This article's critical assessment of what food security studies in South Africa has entailed at the regional level and in global terms also focuses on the methodological and theoretical feminist interventions that can stimulate rigorous conceptual, research and practical attention to what has come to be understood as food sovereignty.     

What Sticks? The Evaluation of a Train-the-Trainer Course in Military Ethics and its Perceived Outcomes

Ethics training has become a common phenomenon in the training of military professionals at all levels. However, the perceived outcomes of this training remain open. In this article, we analyze the experiences of course participants who were interviewed 6–12 months after they had participated in a train-the-trainer course in military ethics developed by the Faculty of Military Sciences of the Netherlands Defence Academy. Through qualitative inductive analysis, it is shown how participants evaluate the training, how they perceive the development of their moral competence, and how they see the impact of the training on their own training practice.     

Moral Aspects of “Moral Injury”: Analyzing Conceptualizations on the Role of Morality in Military Trauma

In clinical circles, the concept of “moral injury” has rapidly gained traction. Yet, from a moral philosophical point of view the concept is less clear than is suggested. That is, in current conceptualizations of moral injury, trauma’s moral dimension seems to be understood in a rather mechanistic and individualized manner. This article makes a start in developing an adequately founded conceptualization of the role of morality in deployment-related distress. It does so by reviewing and synthesizing insights from different disciplines into morality and trauma. This discussion will lead to three positions: (1) values and norms are by definition characterized by conflict, (2) moral conflict may entail important social dimensions, and (3) moral conflict may lead to altered beliefs about previously held values. These insights provide important steps in further developing conceptions of the role of morality in deployment-related suffering.