Using interviews to research body size: methodological and ethical considerations

Fat studies has recently emerged as an interdisciplinary field of scholarship; it aims at challenging dominant, negative and medicalised discourses about fat bodies. Despite the growth of scholarship in this field in human geography, there has been limited discussion of the methodological and ethical issues involved in undertaking such work. This article draws on two research projects on body size – the first about expatriates in Singapore and the second about young people in the UK – in order to discuss some of the methodological and ethical considerations involved in using interviews to research the sized body.