Paper short abstract:

Different communities hold varied perspectives on the relationship between weight and health, yet only some are considered to be legitimate knowledge producers in this area. This paper explores emotions and rationality as mediating factors maintaining this sociopolitical hierarchy of knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

For 30+ years, the weight-centred health paradigm (WCHP) has prevailed in modern Western policy and health science communities, translating into three decades of policy efforts to tackle obesity justified by a goal of improving population health and reducing health inequalities. Concurrently, a growing community of activists (from the fat activism/body liberation movements) and scholars have critiqued anti-obesity efforts from various intertwined social justice perspectives. Historically, these critiques have seldom infiltrated the scientific communities that re(produce) the WCHP. Resultantly, epistemic injustice occurs between producers of the WCHP, who hold significant institutional and political power and activists/scholars who critique the paradigm with little success. This paper studies emotions as a mediating factor that serves to uphold this epistemic injustice and maintain the hegemony of the WCHP in the health science/policy communities. Drawing from an interview study with obesity experts, secondary sources and autoethnographic data from my experience as a researcher positioned in an obesity research group, I explore the dynamics of emotions in relation to debates concerning the WCHP. I identify how the maintenance of epistemic injustice relating to the WCHP is made possible through a fabricated hierarchy of who is considered too emotional to produce legitimised knowledge about weight and who is afforded the label of a rational thinker and subsequently a valid knowledge producer. By identifying examples of where this hierarchy manifests, I offer suggestions for disrupting the socio-political hierarchy of emotions/knowledge relating to the WCHP with the aim of pursuing greater epistemic justice in the health science community.