Aimée Ekman
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Research
Aimée Ekman’s main research concerns experiences and socio-cultural perspectives of body size in general, and more specifically, individuals’ own theorizations of body size and fatness. Her theoretical interests revolve around social order, social subordination, social processes and different forms of action and interaction. She has broad methodological experience of qualitative methods with an emphasis on grounded theory, ethnographic methods, and qualitative interviews.
As a researcher, Aimée participates in diverse multidisciplinary research groups, including colleagues from other disciplines, universities, and professions. Together with colleagues at JU and five other Swedish universities, Aimée is involved in a longitudinal study exploring health-promoting factors among higher education students within healthcare and social work. Another current research project explores perceptions and explanations of body size and health among women in Khayelitsha, a South African Township. She is also engaged in developing two new research projects: the first concerns collaboration between actors within health care and social services. The second is an intervention project aiming to explore processes in relation to the implementation of internationalization at home at the School of Health and Welfare, JU.
Biography
Aimée Ekman serves as a senior lecturer in social work at the School of Health Sciences, Jönköping University. She has a master’s in Social Anthropology from Linköping University and have done ethnographic field work in Khayelitsha, a township of Cape Town. Aimée received her Ph.D. in health and society at Linköping University 2012. In her Ph.D. Aimée introduces a critically oriented and empirically grounded theorization of ‘The Weight Order’ as a complement to theories of more widely recognized and studied ordering systems. The weight order includes everybody, and order people horizontally and vertically based on body size/weight. People with fat bodies tends to be subordinated by this system.