Practices of attention, possibilities for care: Making situations matter in food safety inspection

Abstract

In this article the authors explore how attention and care are related in practice, as encountered in their ethnographic fieldwork on food safety inspection in the UK. Noting that there is a tendency to conceptually conflate the two activities within recent literatures, the authors tease apart the attention and care of inspection to propose that attention offers the conditions of possibility for care, and that its quality can shape that care in significant ways. Attention in this account does not involve simply a visual culture of surveillance, but includes the diverse range of sensory, bodily engagements through which the situations of animal and food production are made to matter. The stud..