Background

This book seeks to draw together lessons learned from a recent series of seminars held in the UK, focused on breastfeeding. We faced many challenges as editors: How could we represent and do justice to something that was lively, dynamic, exciting and changeable, for a person who wasn't there? How could we make sure that the essence of what we thought the thing was about is present, recognisable to those who attended and intelligible to those who weren't there for all or part of the time? These are some of the questions that we wrestled with when we started to sketch out our ideas for the structure, form and content of this book.

As the title of the book suggests, the overarching focus of the seminars was breastfeeding research, policy and practice. The seminars were hosted by three UK universities: the University of the West of England, Bristol (UWE); Cardiff University; and the University of South Wales (USW). They took place during 2015 and 2016, with the location rotating between Cardiff and Bristol.

The ‘thing’ was a series of six, day-long seminars, supported and funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Sally Dowling (UWE), Kate Boyer (Cardiff University), David Pontin (USW) and Julie Mytton (UWE) applied for support for the seminar series in 2014, as it addressed the ESRC's strategic priority of ‘Influencing behaviour and informing interventions’, and particularly the research topics of ‘understanding behaviour’, ‘social diversity’ and ‘health and wellbeing’. There are few spaces where people from different backgrounds can meet, talk, listen and consider breastfeeding from differing but complementary perspectives, and where they can collaborate in knowledge creation. Other UK fora exist for discussing research in relation to policy and practice – the Unicef UK Baby Friendly Initiative Annual Conference is a good example. For highlighting research from a range of disciplines there is the biennial UK Maternal and Infant Nutrition and Nurture Conference. However, none of these highlights the relationships between theory, policy and practice, and collaborative knowledge-making, in the way that we set out to do.