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Verena Fingerling

Verena Fingerling is a doctoral candidate at the Chair of Communication and Counseling in Agricultural, Nutritional and Environmental Sciences. In her studies of ecotrophology (B. Sc.) and nutritional sciences (M. Sc.), her focus was on socio-cultural aspects of food and their application in communication and counseling settings. Using a variety of qualitative methods, she has conducted research on different aspects of health counseling. Formerly a graduate fellow at JLU, Verena Fingerling has also been working in the university's writing consulting department since 2017, in parallel to her doctoral studies.

Research interest

In her dissertation, Verena Fingerling is interested in the changing nature of public communication about nutrition issues in mass media. Using a discourse-analytical approach, she examines the ways in which nutritional identity is constructed here and the changes this has undergone since the postwar period. The focus is on discourses about meat, which in many respects has been handed down as a carrier of social values ((food) security, enjoyment, prosperity, power, etc.) and, in contrast to this, or precisely because of this, has increasingly come under criticism: as the most environmentally harmful of the food groups, as ethically problematic in relation to other people as well as animals. In these contexts, the dissertation project focuses on the publicly mediated and thus legitimized range of interpretive patterns (knowledge), typical social actors, and argumentations that - accumulated in subject positions - are reproduced in the media and brought to the recipients of these media, thus contributing to the construction of their (food) identity.

For decades, criticism of meat has been found in public media, and this criticism is increasingly intensified. Despite the wide range of different foods available today to meet our needs, both physiologically and in terms of taste, meat retains its high status. The work intends to contribute to get to the bottom of this phenomenon and to shed light on places where such meanings are reproduced. Furthermore, the project wants to deal with knowledge from a nutritional science perspective, which is partly circulated and discussed publicly supposedly from this subject.

Associated publications

  • Fingerling, V. & Godemann, J. (2019). Der aktuelle Forschungsstand zum öffentlichen Diskurs zu Fleisch und fleischloser Ernährung in der medialen Berichterstattung. In J. Rückert-John & M. Kröger (Hrsg.), Fleisch. Vom Wohlstandssymbol zur Gefahr für die Zukunft. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 239-268.
  • Fingerling, V. & Godemann, J. (2019). Mediale Konstruktionen von Fleisch. Überlegungen zur Analyse komplexer Ernährungsdiskurse. In C. Lohmeier & T. Wiedemann (Hrsg.), Perspektiven der Diskursanalyse in den Kommunikations- und Medienwissenschaften. Wiesbaden: Springer VS, S. 229-254.
  • Fingerling, V. & Yildiz, J. (2016). Ernährungstherapie bei Kindern mit Neurodermitis. Auswirkungen auf den Familienalltag. Ernährung im Fokus, 16, 172–176.

Selected presentations

  • Fingerling, V. (9/14/18). Why is meat still a thing? Meat as conveyor of identity in public media discourses. Paper presented at the 22nd network conference of the DiskursNetz, Gießen.
  • Fingerling, V. (28.0417). "Meatless diet" as discourse of subjectification. A work in progress report on the public-media construction of diets. Paper presented at the 1st conference of the Qualitative Methods Network, Munich.

 Awards

    In 2018: poster award of the German Nutrition Society (DGE).
    In 2015: Graduate scholarship of the Justus Liebig University Giessen.