Deirdre Byrne

AsIAm is an autistic charity that focuses on representing, connecting, coordinating and unifying the autism community in Ireland (AsIAm 2023). Through their casework and engagement with community m...

This chapter explores how wellbeing embedded into the curriculum and positioning it in the required learning spaces has the potential for wellbeing knowledge and skills to reach the whole student body. This research captures examples of how wellbeing is embedded in the curriculum of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in Ireland and internationally. Starting higher education can be an exciting yet challenging time for students and recent concern for student wellbeing is gaining interest. In early 2021 we interviewed representatives from Irish HEIs who were delivering wellbeing classes, held two discussion groups with student representatives, and searched Irish HEI websites for reference to embedded wellbeing content. The findings show opportunities and challenges for curricular wellbeing support from leadership with cross-campus collaboration using a student centered, whole institution approach.

The overall aim of this article is to explore food and eating practices around the table in children’s residential centres in Ireland. How food is used in residential care – what is eaten, how, when and where it is eaten – increases the sociological understanding of institutional eating practices in the centres. The table is the focus for this article where young people living in residential care and the workers employed there eat together. Commensality is stipulated in the state regulations for residential care centres – the resident group should eat together; it is recognized that hierarchical roles are played out when adults and children eat together; a table is also recognized as an ideal site for the discipline of children into the foodways of their culture and finally food and eating practices at a table can be seen as an expression of governmentality that contributes to the normalization of ‘proper meals’ in a ‘homely home’.

This paper explores how food and eating practices are governed in residential care for young people and who or what governs the table in residential care centres. The governance of everyday food and eating practices in residential care is multifaceted and conducted on multiple levels by external and internal authority and regulation. This paper draws on Coveney’s 2008 theory on ‘the government of the table’ that builds on the Foucauldian perspective of governmentality to explore the interplay between internal and external regulation, which in turn highlights the tensions between institutional and homely aspects of residential care. The approach taken involves an exploratory, sequential mixed-methods design of focused ethnography in five centres, a survey of ninety-two social care practitioners working in the field and a review of Health Information and Quality Authority inspection reports.