Theorizing Breastfeeding Support Assemblages: Developing a More-Than-Human Conceptualization for Breastfeeding Support Studies

Despite a changing social landscape including technological advancements, increasing commercial influence on parenting practices, and a continued push for parents to return to paid labor, studies on breastfeeding support usually position support as a people-based endeavor. This framing does not adequately address the complex, changing nature of support and how it is shaped by a range of human and non-human actors. This paper offers a research agenda for future qualitative/mixed-methods breastfeeding support research that can better account for the diverse forces that constitute breastfeeding support. I first provide a rationale for this paper's contribution to conceptualizing support by reviewing breastfeeding support literature. I then outline a conceptual framework in which researchers can investigate the relations of human and non-human actors that create environments in which parents feel supported to breastfeed. In extending similar theorizations of family practices, including "more-than-human" encounters with infant feeding, this paper calls attention to the complex nature of breastfeeding support, conceptualizing how support comes to matter in a "more-than-human" world. Positioning breastfeeding support as embodied, relational, and emergent, I propose new understandings about the relations of support required to sustain breastfeeding practices and call for greater awareness of the sociomaterial environment in which breastfeeding support is produced or excluded. This has implications for future qualitative breastfeeding support studies and the implementation of breastfeeding support provision.