There is developing interest in issues of embodiment in studies of children, health and illness. We take our point of departure in the parent-child-health/illness triad to explore the embodied aspects of parental vigilance in parenting children who have a food allergy, utilizing the concept of inter-embodiment. Drawing on a focus group study with parents in Sweden the analysis reveals that this vigilance can be seen as the embodied manifestation of concern for children's bodies in perpetual liminality, when constantly exposed to allergens and the risk of becoming ill. We argue that the lens of inter-embodiment, with a focus on bodies in relation, captures how parents lived experience of managing food allergy intertwines with that of their children in the parent-child-health/illness triad. The analysis uncovers a form of embodied knowledge that is often not verbalized, offering potential for new understandings of parent-child relations that center on chronic child health conditions.

Drawing on an interdisciplinary research arts project run by the Department of Special Education and the Department of Psychology at Stockholm University in collaboration with a Day Activity Centre (DAC) with an artistic profile we explore caring relationships within social care practices aimed for people with disabilities. Our research takes its point of departure in critical disability studies. The power dynamic of caring relationships is often imbued by ableist ideas positioning the service user as the ‘vulnerable disabled Other’ and the health/social care worker as the ‘invulnerable expert practitioner’. Yet, there is also the potential of caring relationships to be more reciprocal offering learning opportunities for all involved. Today there is a small body of empirical studies that explore the potential of artwork in challenging the dominant idea of a dichotomy between disability and invulnerable embodiments in health/social care settings. Here we take our point of departure in an ableist approach together with a relational approach to explore caring relationships in such settings. A relational approach entails that phenomena such as learning and creative work are understood as inter-personal phenomena. This indicates that art-work produced within a DAC cannot simply be explained by individual characteristics or by the structural factors and conditions that prevail in the specific context. The relationship itself, what happens within interaction and communication processes between individuals in a particular context, is th eunit of analysis. We have together with the DAC, set up a research arts project and employed ethnographic fieldwork to explore how the interaction between the staff/supervisors and the artists — adults with neuropsychiatric disabilities and adults with learning disabilities — provides opportunities for learning processes in these encounters. During our presentation we will discuss our findings; how the caring relationships offer potentials for joint learning processes and democratic practices.

Food allergy is an illness that requires constant risk management in everyday life. To date, there is no cure or preventive treatment, and the only way to manage the condition is therefore careful avoidance of the offending foodstuff and treatment of reactions when they occur. This article draws on a socio-cultural approach to explore parents' understandings and management of child food allergy in the context of everyday life, as situated' risk. A focus group study was carried out with 31 parents of children diagnosed with food allergy at two children's hospitals. The analysis of the focus group material reveals how the management of allergy risk seems to permeate most aspects of everyday life as well as how the parents draw on a dominant norm of risk avoidance as well as a counter-discourse of calculated risk taking. The patterns of risk management found in this study are discussed in terms of how risk avoidance and risk taking are intertwined and balanced in the context of moral parenthood.