Fat Stigma at Work: Surfacing affect and materiality through poetry

Seminar abstract

This presentation offers insights into the experiences of working women who identify as fat.

The speaker draw from an interview based research project with 22 women from the Netherlands to illustrate how processes of stigmatisation and marginalisation with regards to body size unfolds within organisations.

Instead of taking quotes from these interviews, they use poetry as a form of 'writing differently' in order to analyse and showcase the entanglements between organisational objects, affect, discourses about size and the participants' large bodies.

It is hoped to make felt how size, as an under-researched marker for differentiation, impacts the everyday working lives of the participants.

Furthermore, the speakers want to draw attention to the importance of affect and the materiality in processes of differentiation and how we need innovative methodologies to attend to these.

They will conclude with some reflections on the political potential of their work.

Booking

This seminar is free to attend with no need to book in advance. We warmly invite you to join with friends, colleagues and classmates.

Speaker bios

Dr Noortje van Amsterdam

Dr Noortje van Amsterdam is an Assistant Professor of Organisation Studies at Utrecht School of Governance.

Her work focuses on bodies and health in organisations. Informed by feminist poststructuralist theory, intersectionality and new materialism, her work aims to explore the materialities, affect flows and ideological power structures that create inequalities related to embodied signifiers such as gender, dis/ability, age, sexuality and race/ ethnicity. 

Noortje combines her critical theoretical viewpoint and conventional qualitative methodologies with creative methodologies (e.g. Art-based research, poetic inquiry, visual methods, autoethnographic writing) to shed light on the everyday experiences of people with their bodies and health and to inspire critical reflexivity and empathic understanding.

Dide van Eck

Dide van Eck is a PhD candidate of Gender and Diversity at the institute for Social and Cultural Research at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Her doctoral research explores the (im)possibilities of organising from inclusivity in low-wage labour contexts.

She draws from extensive ethnographic fieldwork and art-based methodologies such as poetic inquiry to analyse organisational practices and marginalised experiences.

Together Noortje and Dide have created a website where they share their research poetry.