Longing for Recognition offers a radical new way of understanding nutritional health practices. In the current culture of an ‘obesity epidemic’ the work of dieticians has accrued new and urgent meaning, and this book is addressed to that growing group of practitioners.

Jacqui Gingras is herself a dietician, and through the use of autoethnographic fiction she presents a critical and thought-provoking argument for a more self-reflexive and embodied profession. Her compelling narrative draws the reader into its timely call for rethinking what counts as knowledge in dietetic education.

Longing for Recognition will be invaluable for health professionals and dieticians who wish to develop a more effective professional practice that considers first and foremost what it means to be human.

"Longing for Recognition is a landmark nutritional and educational text and a whole new way of mapping the terrain. The book is an urgent, eloquent and compelling journey towards tomorrow's dietetics, and Gingras draws us out from 'safe places' to hold vulnerability up to the light. Engagingly narrated through both a personal and a conceptual lens, her book is a telling and necessary exposition of her discoveries."

Lucy Aphramor
Coventry University health researcher

"Professionals too rarely address the limits of their training or the strong emotions produced by the dilemmas they face in their work. This richly layered story – compelling in its attention to real people with complex lives at work and at home – treats nutrition educators as accomplished but also fully human practitioners, who struggle to reconcile the realities of everyday practice with their desires to make a better world, for themselves and others."

Marjorie DeVault
Professor of Sociology, Syracuse University

READ THE SHORT INTRODUCTION (all rights reserved)

A note about the author

Jacqui Gingras is Assistant Professor at Ryerson University’s School of Nutrition, Toronto. Her current academic preoccupations include exploring how vulnerability works to enhance dietetic education and practice. Her doctoral research, on which this book was based, was a reflexive autoethnographic fiction on how dietetic subjectivity, performativity, and curricula shape a collective understanding of food, weight, and health, and was awarded the 2006 Ted Aoki Prize for Outstanding Dissertation in Curriculum Studies. Previous work has appeared in publications as diverse as Feminist Media Studies, Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, and Educational Insights. Jacqui lives in Toronto with her partner and two children.