conference update
International Critical Dietetics Conference: Manchester, 14-16th August 2015
Ursula Arens Writer; Nutrition & Dietetics
Ursula has spent most of her career in industry as a company nutritionist for a food retailer and a pharmaceutical company. She was also a nutrition scientist at the British Nutrition Foundation for seven years. Ursula helps guide the NHD features agenda as well as contributing features and reviews.
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If you are not going to a sunny beach, or to lush hills this summer (= August), you could go somewhere that offers neither of these attractions (= Manchester), but promises a chance to meet and mingle with progressive dietitians from around the world. The international conference for dietitians in Manchester in August has the theme: ‘Doing Justice: shaping change through experience, science and imagination’. There will be debates to consider how to promote new understandings for advancing health equity, food justice and nutritional wellbeing using diverse means of knowledge creation. The themes of the conference involve a critical examination of the dietetic practice that is shaped by familiar norms, but also shaped by less explicit silences. Critical Dietetics is a fairly new concept, but this event will be the fifth International Conference on this theme. Manchester follows other exciting venues of Chicago, Nova Scotia in Canada and Sydney. The venue will be the Manchester International Conference Centre and full details of the programme and registration are listed on: www.criticaldietetics.org. Star speakers will include Dr Clare Gerada, who was the first female Chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners, with a particular interest in female leadership, and Food Policy expert Dr Geoff Tansey. The UK host organiser is dietitian Dr Lucy Aphramor, who is one of the founder members of the Critical Dietetics movement. She describes the trigger of her need to re-examine care concepts from thoughts she had during her first dietetics post. “As I sat in clinic in some of the most deprived areas of
NHDmag.com July 2015 - Issue 106
Coventry, using only the knowledge I brought from university, I had a growing sense that I was missing something important that linked people’s lived experience and their health.” In 2004, Lucy won the Rose Simmonds Special Award, which funded her attendance at the 14th International Congress of Dietetics in Chicago. This allowed her to develop contacts with many fellow dietitians in the US and Canada, which led to the organisation of a seminar in Canada in 2009 entitled Beyond Nutritionism: Rescuing Dietetics through Critical Dialogue. It was at this event that a declaration was made to launch the concept of Critical Dietetics. Critical Dietetics is interested in sparking conversations about novel ways of approaching the complex social, political and cultural issues encountered in the broad field of dietetics and nutrition practice, research and education. Some of the multiple perspectives that define the term ‘critical’ may lead to different, perhaps improved ways, to support nutrition aspects of public health, particularly in relation of social and environmental issues. There is perhaps no full definition of the term Critical Dietetics, but some intentions are captured in the declaration agreed in June 2009. It aspires to capture the relationships between food and health as more than the nutrient contents of foods connecting to
