Research

With the research area of communication about food on social media platforms and its linkages with everyday actions, we are taking up a current phenomenon that has so far been insufficiently examined from sociological perspectives. The questions of how food communication on social media platforms is connected to the offline food actions of users, and whether we can really speak of ‘food influencers’ in this context, have not yet been answered sufficiently. With literature reviews, media sociological approaches and methods of qualitative social research, we investigate what is known about it so far and whether and how the food-related everyday actions of users are linked to social media food communication.

Social discourses on food and nutrition can tell us a lot about how aspects of food are negotiated, perceived, and understood. Qualitative (e.g., content analysis or discourse analysis) and quantitative (e.g., corpus linguistic) analyses of nutrition-related discourses on TV, newspapers, and magazines as well as on websites and social media platforms offer endless research possibilities. As part of our ongoing research, we focus on various social discourses on food and nutrition. Most recently, for example, we have investigated communicatively constructed understandings of responsibility and sustainability in the food industry. Our findings help to make the action logics of different actors comprehensible and to derive starting points from the different understandings and perceptions uncovered, how individuals, groups and/or organizations can be approached for health- or sustainability-related topics.