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The food and beverage industry is beginning to focus on product reformulation as its key strategy to tackle obesity, and resource itself accordingly. In February 2019, Food Drink Ireland (FDI) launched a report ostensibly describing improvements in population-level dietary patterns in Ireland that resulted from industry-led reformulation initiatives. We sought to conduct a rigorous, objective assessment of this report. We found that it contains six fundamental flaws: it infers a causal relationship betweenindustry-led food reformulation and decreases in sugar, salt, saturated fat and energy intake; it selectively uses points of time and products, which leads to a high risk of selection bias; it blurs the difference between a marketing research report and ascientific report; it aggregates decreases in salt, sugar and saturated fats across categories and this masks the uneven nature of reformulation strategies; it introduces a status quo bias, normalizing the 2005 starting point; and it assumes that any progress in dietary change was solely as a result of industry voluntarism, demoting the work of public health and government policy. We think it is important that the limitations and weaknesses in the report are brought to the attention of the National Clinical Programme for Obesity and the Department of Health. We have provided a brief synopsis of international peer-reviewed research on industry-led reformulation strategies and consider the policy implications for the Irish Government.

This paper examines the interactive relationship between intangible, human capabilities (operant resources) and tangible, physical assets (operand resources) in an era of global interconnectedness. It does so within the context of service-dominant logic and the challenge of sustainability in a world of resource scarcity. It challenges conventional ideas about the superiority of certain kinds of resources and it confronts a pervasive culture of demateriality both in marketing and contemporary post-industrial theory – the idea that ‘stuff’ does not count. Building on calls for a revised theory of economics and society, this paper offers a parsimonious model of a more holistic conceptualization of resources. It demonstrates the complex entanglement of operant and operand resources, finding that this entanglement is a precondition to marketing-related issues of natural resource selection, globalization, sustainability, and distributive justice.

This article is concerned with what a technological gaze might mean; what regimes of truth and what new modes of subjectivity are filtered through it. By drawing on television and print advertising, we can see the pervasiveness of a gaze that is technological in contemporary Western consumer culture. This article argues that, far from being a simple “ high-tech” effect, a technological gaze is a way of seeing that may be deconstructed. To this end, it will call on visual culture studies, feminism, film theory and Derridean deconstruction to highlight how high-tech images are cultural artefacts, which underscore contemporary imaginings about bodies and environments. The technological gaze uses specific methods to put its meaning together- impossible subject-positioning, the codification of flesh, a visualisation of scientific narratives and the aestheticisation of information- all of which tell us about a longer line of cultural fantasies about information, code and technology.

Fracking is an emotive issue. That is the starting point for this thesis which explores public engagement in the context of environmental controversy in Ireland. Love Leitrim, an anti-fracking community campaign, opposes fracking. They do so not just through scientific knowledge practices, but through a felt and meaningful performative imaginary. This thesis aims to explore the richness of this anti-fracking imaginary by paying attention to the affective practices involved. This is with a view to considering what value this understanding might have for public engagement. The empirical work involved unstructured interviews, participant observation, and image and video analysis. The findings explore what affective practices are evident in the anti-fracking imaginary, detailing love, hate, positivity, enchantment, anger, fear, and more. The analysis examines how emotions such as shock and fear unsettle the community, opening a fracking future that produces distinct orderings of time, space, and society. It looks at the settling of temporal, spatial and social order in an affectively-charged counter-imaginary whereby fracking is imagined as absent. It uncovers a politics of violation and consent, ownership, and healing that deal with traumatic memories of Troubles-era violence, hopeful sustainable futures, and the protection of community, place, and a way of life. The thesis ends by examining these issues in more detail, suggesting that affectively charged imaginaries provide unique opportunities for engagement. I argue that the creative capacity of affect could allow us to imagine together in playful, performative, and participatory ways which foster care, trust, sensitivity and empathy. I suggest that this kind of engagement constitutes a politics that is just and in which collective visions can be reimagined and resettled in ways that embrace and value difference.