JULY 2019 VOLUME 1

EASA FOOD NETWORK

NEWSLETTER
THIS EDITION
Editorial
CALL: 1ST EASA FOOD NETWORK
Dear Network Members, POSTGRADUATE PAPER AWARD

We are very happy to introduce this first newsletter of our EASA

CALL: ENTRIES ON FOOD
Anthropology of Food Network. We are thrilled to have received
PRACTICES
so many interesting reports and announcements and that they
reflect the diversity and creativity of our members’ research and
the anthropology of food at large. EVENT REPORT: SEEING
THROUGH FOOD
Our plan is to prepare a newsletter bi-annually. We hope that
this will become a great resource to share our research, ideas,
calls, publications, photo essays etc. We envision this as a MEMBER PROFILES AND
space to discuss the theoretical and methodological aspects of PROJECTS
anthropological research on food and its contributions to the
discipline at large. We also hope to reach out beyond the
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
discipline and consider what anthropological research adds to
the general understanding of and knowledges about food.

RECENT GRANTS
For our Network, this year has been a bit slower in activities
compared to 2018, when we focused on the organization of
panels and the preparation of papers, as well as our first official
Network meeting at the EASA conference in Stockholm.
However, our Network is growing and new ideas are developed
by the members. We welcomed Stephanie Hobbis as the new
co-convener and initiated the EASA Award for a Postgraduate
Student Paper in the Anthropology of Food (deadline: August 4,
2019!). This Network is a collective endeavour, so all the
members are invited to come up with and initiate new activities
or projects. If you have any ideas on how to improve the
newsletter and would like to get involved, please let us know!

This is just the beginning of our discussions about studying food

in anthropology, and we are looking forward to what comes
next.

With best summer wishes,

Stephanie Hobbis and Zofia Boni

EASA FOOD NETWORK NEWSLETTER

JULY 2019
Call for Submissions: 1st EASA Award for a Postgraduate
Student Paper in the Anthropology of Food
Masters and early PhD students in Anthropology (or
closely related disciplines) who are involved in the
anthropological study of food are invited to submit their
papers for consideration for the 1st EASA Award for a
Postgraduate Student Paper in the Anthropology of Food.
This award has been set up by the EASA Anthropology of
Food network in collaboration with the EASA journal,
Social Anthropology/ Anthropologie Sociale, to encourage
anthropological research into food among emerging
scholars at European universities.
The submissions will be adjudicated by a panel of three
experts, scholars engaged with the Anthropology of Food:
Dr Guntra Aistra (Central European University), Dr
Katharina Graf (SOAS Food Studies Centre, a former
EASA Food Network convener), and Dr Jakob Klein
(Chair of the SOAS Food Studies Centre, University of
London).
Eligibility
Candidates must be registered in a Master’s program
in Anthropology, or a similar discipline, at a European
university, or have graduated from a Master’s
programme less than two years ago; or be currently in
the early stages of their PhD in a relevant discipline.
Co-authored papers will be considered as long as the
first author fulfils the first criteria; no author is allowed
to hold a PhD at the time of submission.
The paper
Should be sent to the EASA Food Network co-
convenors Dr Zofia Boni (zb53@soas.ac.uk) and Dr
Stephanie Hobbis (stephanie.hobbis@wur.nl)
Must be received by Sunday, 4th of August 2019
Must be no less than 4500 words and not exceed 6000
words (including bibliography)
Has to be submitted in English
Must include an abstract
Must indicate the university at which the candidate is
(or was) registered and their current year in the
programme
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Judging criteria
The adjudicating committee will look for
papers that:
Explicitly engage with anthropological
research on food, and clearly
demonstrate that engagement in their
treatment of the topic.
Are based on the author(s)’ own
research.
Are ethnographically rich and
demonstrate effective use of theory and
data.
Are not merely descriptive and show
evidence of original critical analysis.
Are well organized, coherent in their
argumentation and overall a pleasure to
read.
The information about the award-winning
paper and its author will be promoted
within and beyond the EASA Food
Network. The winning paper will be
accepted for review and considered for
publication in Social Anthropology/
Anthropologie Sociale.
We would like to invite programme
conveners, teachers and supervisors to
disseminate the information about this
award among their Master and Doctoral
students, and encourage students to
apply.
APPLY NOW!
Deadline:
August 4, 2019
JULY 2019 VOLUME 1

Call for Contributions: Entries on Food Practices

The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, Volume 3

by Petra Matijevic

On behalf of Professor Alena V. Ledeneva and the Global Informality

Project International Board, EASA member Dr Petra Matijevic invites
you to submit entries for the Global Encyclopaedia of Informality,
Volume 3.

The Global Informality Project (GIP, in-formality.com) is an

interdisciplinary research project residing at UCL in London. Set up in
2014, it is the first multimedia online resource that explores the social
and cultural complexity of informal practices and structures from a
global perspective through its comparative and ethnographic
investigations. Over the years, the collection of practices has grown
into a comprehensible, easily accessible resource for audiences in
academia, policy-making, businesses and the public. The printed
version, The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, Volumes 1 and 2,
was published by UCL Press in 2018 in open access. As the
collection continues to grow, GIP is preparing the third volume of the
Encyclopaedia, still within a general theme of open secrets, unwritten
rules and lack of clear-cut categorisation, but with a focus on
practices associated with tensions around care: personal,
interpersonal, mutual and welfare. A section of the new volume will
focus specifically on informality associated with food practices, past
and present.

GIP invites you to submit food-related encyclopaedic entries to

strengthen the representation of nourishment in its economic,
political, social and cultural context. Possible contributions include:
informal food markets and solidarity purchase groups; survival
strategies and recipes developed to get by in times of shortage; food
activism; informal urban agriculture, slaughter, or alcohol distillation;
euphemisms for informal payments using food-related expressions;
medicinal folk foods and rituals, and foods as markers of identity. We
will be interested in the colloquial names of such practices and the
contexts in which they are recognised, articulated and performed.
Entries should be between 1,000 and 1,500 words, inclusive of
bibliography.

Please contact GIP at informality2014@gmail.com by

1 August 2019 with an expression of interest. See http://www.in-
formality.com/wiki/ Joining_the_Global_Informality_Project for
more information.

EASA FOOD NETWORK NEWSLETTER

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Event Report: We Make the City Conference

Seeing through Food

by Vincent Walstra

‘’Would the visitors of your garden think of short food chains?’’, the convener asks Anna who is sitting next
to him on the stage. Rather than answering the question directly, Anna replies saying that the people in the
urban garden empower themselves by attaining a set of skills to grow their own food. Mid-June in
Amsterdam, the Netherlands, there is an event called We Make The City (WMTC), during which Pakhuis de
Zwijger organizes a long list of conferences on multiple locations spread out through the city. The
question? How do we envision our Amsterdam into the future, ‘for all of us!’ as it says in capital letters on
the brochure. On Tuesday 18th of June I attended a conference on the topic of ‘De Nieuwe Markt’ (The
New Market), discussing experiences and opportunities to establish a more sustainable and equal urban
foodscape.

We start the day with a presentation of Carolyn Steel who lectures us about the relation between the urban
and the rural, between citizens and food. She explains her argument with a simple but striking observation:
‘’These days we don’t look out of our windows and see the landscape that feeds us.’’ We should take this
quote literally, but one can sense that Steel also points into another level of seeing. Nowadays we lack an
understanding and appreciation of food and the landscape that produces it. We should see through food,
she proposes, instead of the current ‘industrial’ reading of food as commodity and fuel for the body. It is
the difference between shaping a food landscape to our everyday practices, or shaping our everyday
practices to a food landscape. This is a recurring theme, but often latent when talking about innovative
practices of food procurement. Food is at the same time at the center and on the side-line of today’s
debates, because acknowledging food as an active agent seems yet too divergent.

The question of seeing can be extended to another issue concerning the making of the city. Referring back
to the quote in the beginning, it is telling that the convener asks his question to Anna, and not directly to
the participants of her urban gardening project. But there is also a good reason for this; the participants
are not here. The people who attend this conference are entrepreneurs, innovators, civil servants,
academics. Even though the main concern of WMTC is to be inclusive, at least in this workshop the
excluded, like ‘farmers’ or ‘marginalized groups’, are absent. This lack of diversity of visions on how ‘we
make the city’ endangers the mission of equality. The absence of these actors reflects a structural absence
of such agents in societal debates. However, on a side note I must say that this is only one workshop of
many, and thus I cannot speak of the diversity during the entire event. And aside from this point for
improvement in diversity, most important is that the We Make The City-event is a demonstration of how
citizens mobilize to become engaged in the formation of future cities. Instead of standing on the side-line,
they organize bottom-up events to facilitate processes of social innovation that aim to tackle social
inequalities and lacking sustainability.

‘’Wo l t e vi r of yo ga n
t i k of s o t fo c a s?’’
EASA FOOD NETWORK NEWSLETTER
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Member Profiles and Projects
Imogen Bevan, PhD student, Social Anthropology,
the University of Edinburgh
Imogen Bevan's PhD research explores sugar
consumption from an anthropological perspective.
Public health and medical models of sugar
consumption locate sugar consumption in the
individual – rather than in society and culture. The
study is based on 12 months of in-depth immersive
fieldwork with families, primary schools and medical
practitioners in Leith, a socially and economically
diverse Edinburgh neighbourhood. Imogen examines
the role of sugar in social relationships, and takes up
questions about meaning and pleasure raised by her
previous ethnographic research on smoking (Bevan,
2015; Bevan, 2016). This research addresses
tensions around sugar as a series of moral choices
encompassing gender, class, parenting, education,
health and the body.
Emma Cook, Associate Professor, Modern
Japanese Studies Program, Anthropology,
Hokkaido University
Project: When Food is Risky: Food Allergies in
Japan and the UK
Food allergies have shown a steady increase around
the world in recent years. In Japan such allergies
have more than doubled in the last ten years (MEXT
2014) with roughly 2% of adults and 4% of children
having food allergy. The UK situation is similar, with
an estimated 2% of adults and 8% of children with a
diagnosed food allergy (Meike 2014). Social
awareness has grown exponentially in line with the
increase in sufferers. However, responses to such
allergies – individually, socially, politically and
medically – vary in different cultural contexts. This
project ethnographically explores the social,
individual, and medical aspects of managing
potentially life-threatening food allergies in different
cultural contexts, looking specifically at Japan and
the UK.
EASA FOOD NETWORK NEWSLETTER
VOLUME 1
Jean Duruz, Adjunct Senior Research Fellow,
School of Creative Industries, University of South
Australia, and Affiliate Professor, Culinaria
Research Centre, University of Toronto.
For most of her writing life Jean has focused on food
as a medium of interethnic exchange in global cities
such as Singapore, Mexico City, and Sydney.
Recently, with Dr Angela Giovanangeli of the
University of Technology Sydney, Jean has embarked
on a new project focusing on Marseille’s culinary
cultures in contexts of ethnically “mixed”
Mediterranean port cities, and their engagement with
meanings of gentrification, identity and food.
Mascha Guggannig, Postdoctoral Researcher,
Research Group "Innovation, Society and Public
Policy" (ISPP), Munich Center for Technology in
Society, Technical University Munich
I am a social and cultural anthropologist broadly
interested in food, agriculture and the environment,
among others in relation to new technologies,
innovation and scientific debates. This makes science
& technology studies (STS) my second
interdisciplinary field. My work spans from agricultural
biotechnology and land relations in Hawai'i to
reconfigurations of plants and the environment in
controlled growth settings (e.g. indoor vertical
farming), to sustainable agriculture in the EU and
Germany.
The latter topic is the subject of my current multisited
research project where I analyze what is understood
and envisioned as "sustainable agriculture" in the
European Union, and how this plays out in one
member state, that is Germany. The project will draw
together the policy level (Brussels), and two different
agricultural sites in Germany that use high-tech
(digital agriculture), and low or no technology at all
(agroecology/permaculture). The two overarching and
linked questions of the project are what role
innovation, technology and experiential knowledge
play in practices and visions of sustainable
agriculture, and what visions of Europe (and Germany)
are co-produced with the respective policies and
practices of sustainable agriculture. The project takes
three years, and is funded by the German Research
Foundation.
 JULY 2019
Member Profiles and Projects
Judit Farkas, PhD, Adjunct, Department of
European Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology,
University of Pécs
My fields of research include religious, social and
ecological movements. Currently my key topics are
Hungarian ecovillages: I study the origin, socio-
cultural background, ideology, social structure and
lifestyle of these communities. The ecovillage is a
specific type of settlement created in response to an
ecological, economic and social crisis. The pursuit of
an environmentally friendly way of life and self-
sufficiency is also reflected in the food culture of
ecovillagers, providing an interpretation of safe food
deeply embedded in the ecological discourse.
I study the considerations that govern the foodways
of ecovillagers and how these manifest in practice,
from farm to table. I analise the modalities of
preparing for an ecological crisis, the relationship and
significance of biodiversity and gastrodiversity, and
demonstrate the role attributed to the community as
an institution in this process. The main topics of my
ethnographic data are: agriculture, permaculture,
gardening, agroforestry, local food, organic food,
self-made food, reciprocity, self-suffiency,
community-construction via food and agriculture,
economy, livelihood strategies, adaption to climate
change, adaption of ideological basis to given
circumstances, human−nature−food etc. I do special
case study on a Hungarian ecological Hare Krishna
community (Krishna-Valley Ecovillage). This study
examines the interaction of ecological and hindu
religious ideology both in theory and practice.
Nafsika Papacharalampous, PhD, SOAS Food
Studies Centre, University of London
My research focuses on the metamorphosis of the
Greek cuisine at times of crisis. I focus on upscale
delis in Athens and the middle-class Athenians who
own and shop at these spaces, as well as fine dining
restaurants in Athens, engaging with the chefs and
cooks who create a New Greek Cuisine. My
EASA FOOD NETWORK NEWSLETTER
VOLUME 1
ethnography brings together different spaces (the
village and the city), as well as different temporalities,
and how these are imaginatively reproduced through
food practices. In search of the threads that bring the
rural past into the urban present, my research
discusses the unveiling the shifting notions of the rural
and the urban, tradition and modernity, and how the
preservation and invention of foodways are redefined
and negotiated in the creation of cuisine. I investigate
how national and class identities, as well as individual
and collective memories, are renegotiated and
redefined at times of crisis in Greece. Beyond Greece,
by engaging with food and the senses (smell and
taste) as tropes of resistance at times of crisis, I
engage ethnographically and theoretically with
anthropological debates on precarity, moral economy
and the political role of commensality.
Vincent Walstra, PhD Candidate, Cultural
Anthropology, Leiden University
Project: ‘Food citizens? Collective food procurement in
European cities: solidarity and diversity, skills and
scale.’
In our research project ‘Food Citizens?’, the question
mark is fundamental. We ask whether collective food
procurement practices indicate something we can call
‘food citizenship’, or if they (also) reinforce hegemonic
imaginaries. This question is studied by considering
three different ‘levels’ on which citizens collectively
engage with shaping the foodscape; urban foraging,
short food chains, and food governance. Why do
people establish and participate in urban gardens?
Who are the people producing and consuming local
food? How does the (local) government respond to
bottom-up innovation in food procurement? These and
other questions are at the heart of a comparative
study between Rotterdam, Gdansk (Poland) and Turin
(Italy), where colleagues Ola Gracjasz and Maria
Vasile conduct their research. The research project
initiated when principal investigator prof. dr. Cristina
Grasseni received her ERC Consolidator Grant in
2016. Three years later we are on the brink of going
into a fieldwork period of one year where we will be
spading fields, distributing food, and interviewing civil
servants. We aim to share some of our experiences on
our website. Those who are interested can keep track
of our project on
https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/foodcitizens
JULY 2019 VOLUME 1

Recent Publications
Boni, Zofia. 2019. "The sociology of food is not about eating, it is about doing a lot of very hard thinking: An
interview with Professor Anne Murcott". Current Sociology, online first.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0011392119850100

Cook, Emma E. 2017. “Risk and Affective Co-ordination: Food Allergy Experiences in the UK,” Japanese
Review of Cultural Anthropology (JRCA) 18 (1): 129-142.

Cook, Emma E. 2018. "Human-Microbe Entanglements: Food Allergies in Japan and the UK." More-than-
Human Worlds: A NatureCulture Blog Series. https://www.natcult.net/human-microbe-entanglements/

Cook, Emma E. 2019. "Microbial Management." Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights, April 25.
https://culanth.org/fieldsights/microbial-management

Cook, Emma E. (Forthcoming) "Food Allergies, Illness and Personhood in Japan." In Understanding Japanese
Society (5th Edition), edited by Joy Hendry. London and New York: Routledge.

Duruz, Jean. 2018. “Trucking in Tastes and Smells: Adelaide’s Street Food and the Politics of Urban
‘Vibrancy’.” In Senses in Cities: Experiences of Urban Settings, edited by Kelvin E.Y. Low and Devorah
Kalekin-Fishman, 169-184. London: Routledge.

Duruz Jean. 2019. “Geographies of Fusion: Re-imagining Singaporean and Malaysian Food in Global Cities of
the West.” In Routledge Handbook of Food in Asia, edited by Cecilia Leong-Salobir, 13-28. London:
Routledge.

Duruz, Jean. 2019. “Laksa Nation: Tastes of ‘Asian’ Belonging, Borrowed and Re-imagined.” In Culinary
Nationalism in Asia, edited by Michelle King. New York: Bloomsbury.

Farkas, Judit. 2017. “'There Are No Recipes' An Anthropological Assessment of Nutrition in Hungarian
Ecovillages. Acta Ethnographica Hungarica 62(2), 319–338. DOI: 10.1556/022.2017.62.2.4

Farkas, Judit. 2019. “'The Body Has No Soul, the Soul Has a Body': The Concept of Soul
and Nature in the Hungarian Krishna Valley Ecovillage." In Body, Soul, Spirits and Supernatural
Communication, edited by Éva Pócs, 34-53. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Hobbis, Stephanie K. 2017. “Peacebuilding, Foodways and the Everyday: A Fragile Confidence in Post-
Intervention Solomon Islands.” Social Anthropology/ Anthropologie Sociale 25(4): 470-484.

Mescoli, E. 2018. "Cultures alimentaires et appartenances. Une ethnographie dans l’espace de la frontière. In
Frontières : approche multidisciplinaire, edited by L. Lika, A. Weerts, J. Contor, & S. Wintgens, 109-124,
Liège, Belgium : Presses Universitaires de Liège.

Mescoli, E. 2019. "Food practices among Moroccan families in Milan: creative adjustments of cultural
repertoires." In Anthropology of Family Food Practices: Constraints, Adjustments, Innovations, edited by M.-P.,
Julien & N. Diasio, 217-240. Brussels, Belgium: Peter Lang.

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Recent Publications

Wilson, Marisa and Amy McLennan. 2019. A comparative ethnography of nutrition interventions: structural
violence and the industrialisation of agrifood systems in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Social Science &
Medicine 228:172-180.

Wilson, Marisa, Alfy Gathorne-Hardy, Peter Alexander and Lisa Boden. 2018. Why culture matters for
planetary health. The Lancet Planetary Health, November, DOI:10.1016/S2542-5196(18)30205-5

Special Issue
Losing Appetite for the EU? Tensions around Food in Central and Eastern Europe

Boni, Zofia and Petra Matijevic (eds.) (2019) "Losing Appetite for the EU? Tensions around Food in Central
and Eastern Europe". Special Issue, Appetite. https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/appetite/special-
issue/103MSWWG97R

OPEN ACCESS UNTIL JULY 23, 2019

Petra Matijevic and Zofia Boni

Introduction: Losing appetite for the EU? Tensions around food in Central and Eastern Europe
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195666319306555

Renata Blumberg and Diana Mincyte

Infrastructures of taste: Rethinking local food histories in Lithuania

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195666318310080

Joanna Mroczkowska

Pork politics: The scales of home-made food in Eastern Poland

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195666318310250

Ester Bardone and Astra Spalvēna

European Union food quality schemes and the transformation of traditional foods into European products in
Latvia and Estonia
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195666318309784

Albena Shkodrova

Rediscovering Europe and national Cuisine. How EU integration is shaping food tastes in Sofia and Belgrade in
the 21st century
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195666318309772

Ronald Ranta and Nevena Nancheva

Eating banitsa in London: Re-inventing Bulgarian foodways in the context of Inter-EU migration
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195666318310055

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Recent Grants
Visualizing Sugaropolis: Interdisciplinary Recreations of Greenock’s Transnational Past
(BA/Leverhulme, 2018-2019), PI (Wilson) with Robin Sloan (Abertay) and Emma Bond (St Andrews).

Which interdisciplinary research methods can best convey the transnational and multiply-inhabited nature of
capitalist spaces of consumption? This project will use participatory and co-design methodologies to
visualize and re-imagine how diverse agents involved in Greenock’s sugar industry inhabited transnational
spaces. Preliminary archival research will inform a series of activities with school children, university
students and museum visitors, using methodological experimentation such as taste interviews and the co-
design of story maps, game prototypes and virtual landscapes. The purpose of these activities is to enable
the researchers to assess which methodological tools best convey complex geographies of meaning, power
and exclusion and the multiple, creative and unfinished nature of such capitalist encounters. By creating
visual narratives about the role of sugar in Greenock’s past, the project seeks to develop inclusive and
accessible explanations for sugar’s role in Scotland’s history, with direct relevance to contemporary concerns
about health inequalities in Scotland.

2019. ‘Caricrop: exploring the potential of new technologies to support local and inter-regional
agricultural trade in the Caribbean’, College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences-GCRF Internal
Funding (Edinburgh), £47,171, Co-I; with PI, Larissa Pschetz and Co-I Kate Symonds, Co-I Benjamin
Bach, Co-I Jessica Enright.

Although they must be applied with due consideration of stemming (rather than exacerbating) inequalities
and fostering democratic deliberation (Manski, 2017), technologies such as blockchain provide an
opportunity to rethink existing models of distribution and trade. Indeed, if co-developed with local
stakeholders, blockchain could have a huge impact on lifting rural communities out of poverty by reducing
external dependencies, developing market access to urban middle classes and increasing profits.
Technologies such as blockchain can add some degree of predictability to sales and farmers’ income, which
is often affected by unexpected fluctuations in the market, environmental and meteorological variability, and
limited or no access to technical assistance or commercial channels. Blockchain can provide information and
connect farmers to final consumers, supporting new relationships of trade. The project focuses on supporting
inter-regional trade and development in the Caribbean, which is an important part of the Regional Food and
Nutrition Security Policy of the Caribbean. The project will focus on consolidating partnership with academics
from the University of the West Indies, in Mona, Jamaica andrepresentatives of the Eastern Caribbean
Trading Agriculture and Development Organisation (ECTAD) based in St Vincent and the Grenadines.

2019-2020. ‘AHRC US-UK Food Digital Scholarship network+ (AH/S012591/1)’, £50,000, Co-I. with PI
Christian Reynolds (Sheffield) and team.

The AHRC US-UK Food Digital Scholarship network provides a platform for US and UK cultural institutions,
and researchers to network around the topic of food. It will map existing stakeholders, datasets and food
research priorities, advise on digitisation standards, run virtual workshops, link to cross-disciplinary UKRI
research, and build capacity via pump priming funding for future research. The network-research themes are:
1. Manuscripts 2. Printed literature 3. Other collections.

WHY A FOOD DIGITAL SCHOLARSHIP NETWORK? Food has become an increasingly popular subject of
study due to its inherently multidisciplinary nature. Food's universal pervasiveness allows it to become an
accessible window into every culture and time period. The materials and texts concerning food offer a
continuous resource that spans thousands of years of human civilisation, with a massive corpus of written

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JULY 2019 VOLUME 1

Recent Grants
manuscripts, printed documents (books, pamphlets, menus), and other material culture and ephemera
(including images and sound recordings) available for study. Many cultural institutions have large collections
relating to food, some of which, now fully or partially digitised, are accessible to the global research
community. However, knowledge of the existence and depth of many of the collections is limited, and there is
a lack of communication between cultural institutions, data providers and researchers. Detailed mapping of
the network has not been undertaken, and many possible connections have not yet been made.
There is a large existing academic audience for food-related content in the multidisciplinary fields of food
studies, gastronomy, anthropology, archaeology, sociology, and nutrition, domestic and medical history.
Given opportunity and access, an even wider public audience would engage with historic food texts. In
addition, there are multiple food-related programmes of education research running in the UK and US, all of
which require access to material and data.

Many global challenges are also directly related to food. The food system is linked to 30% of total
greenhouse gas emissions, and healthcare costs are increasing due to diet-related issues (60%+ of adults in
the UK and US are now Obese or Overweight). Food is also central to many countries' economies (11% of
total employment in the US) and cultural heritage.

Addressing these food-related global issues requires an interdisciplinary approach featuring (digital)
humanities researchers, and content from cultural institutions, to provide a narrative, context and grounding
for research and solutions, to highlight underrepresented voices, and to give greater insight into cultures,
traditions and the preservation/ of culinary knowledge.

Until now, coordination and networking between food-related UK and US cultural institutions and researchers
has been limited.

UKRI has previously funded interdisciplinary research through Global Food Security (one of UKRI's
multidisciplinary programmes), alongside investment in UKRI food networks such as the STFC food
network+, and the EPSRC Internet of Food Things+. These networks have, however, been severely lacking
in input from the humanities. This proposed network represents a vital opportunity for UK and US
researchers and cultural institutions to engage with and link to the wider interdisciplinary food research
programmes.

The main collaborating cultural organisations represent some of the largest and most important UK/US
digitised food-based collections: the Boston University (project partner), U of Sheffield, U of Leeds,
Wellcome Collection, Guildhall Library, U of York, U of Brighton, the Linnean Society, and Folger
Shakespeare Library, UC San Diego Library, National Museum of American History, U of Southern
Mississippi, U of South Florida (US).

Further impact and reach is delivered through our partner organisations: JISC, Adam Matthews, The Recipes
Project, H-Nutrition, FRiED, N8 Agrifood, and the Friends of the Oxford Symposium.

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Recent Grants
2020-2022. ‘Living Histories of Sugar in Scotland and the West Indies: Transnationalisms,
Performance and Co-creation’, AHRC Research Networking Grant (AH/S01148X/1), £44,790, PI; with
Co-I Robin Sloan, Abertay University

Sugar is not just a commodity, but a set of social relationships across space and time. This project aims to
recast how we think about, understand and live with the transnational and unfinished nature of the sugar
industry in Scotland and the West Indies. Through a series of workshops with West Indian and Scottish
performance artists, we will co-create songs, stories and visualisations that invite multiple and diverse
interpretations of Scotland's role in the slave (18th-19th) and sugar trades (18th-20th centuries). During
these workshops we will: 1) show how text and data mining can underpin new artistic material (songs) about
sugar, enslavement and sugar work and assess whether these methods can increase access to audio data
recorded in non-standard English; 2) create storylines for interactive performances that include
visualisations, historical re-enactments and new and old storytelling songs; 3) begin concept work with
museologists and industry professionals for a Mixed Reality (MR) experience to be developed with further
funding.

The network will bring together Trinibagonian, Jamaican and Scottish actors and singers/songwriters with an
international and interdisciplinary group of scholars with expertise in the histories and geographies of sugar,
enslavement and indentureship (Edinburgh, Glasgow, St Andrews), role playing history (Edinburgh), sound
studies (Virginia Commonwealth, Texas), aural data mining (Edinburgh, Texas), data visualisation
(Edinburgh, St Andrews) and MR (Abertay, Edinburgh). In year 1 we will generate aural and visual data,
songs and storylines, drawing from previously-collected archival and oral history data about the Scottish
sugar industry and ongoing (PhD) research about sugar, enslavement and indentureship in the West Indies.
In addition to historical research into secondary literatures, we will explore digitised archival films, songs,
oral histories, photos, cadastral and trade maps, landscape paintings, migration data and personal papers of
Scottish families who owned Scottish estates, located in the Archive for Cultural Equity, the University of the
West Indies Erna Brodber Collection, the Trinidad and Tobago National Archives, the National Libraries of
Scotland and Jamaica, the Jamaican Memory Bank, the National Records of Scotland and the University of
Edinburgh's Scottish Studies and Sound Archives. In year 2 we will finalise the interactive performance by
utilising: 1) the storylines and songs co-created in year 1, and 2) visualisations developed in years 1 and 2
by two MA students in Design Informatics. Songs, stories and visualisations captured in the live
performances, and audience feedback, will provide the groundwork for conceptualising the MR experience.
MR concept work will be initiated at the end of the project during a final workshop with UK creative
businesses and museologists. Our aim for both the performance and the MR conceptualisation is to reveal
transnational sugar as both 'multiply-inhabited': involving different people across place and space, and 'multi-
dimensional': involving a variety of social transformations, e.g. demographic, cultural, dietary, environmental.

With increasing interest in Scotland's involvement in slavery, the project offers a timely opportunity to
develop understandings of the effects of sugar, enslavement and sugar work on both sides of the Atlantic.
The primary public output of the project - two interactive live performances - will enable diverse audiences in
Scotland and the West Indies to question established historical narratives and share their own living histories
of sugar. The performances and other project activities will exist beyond the life of the project through a
webpage (hosted on University of Edinburgh's Media Hopper and open.ed.ac.uk) that shows how archival
materials were repurposed through practices of co-creation, with links to the digital archival collections.

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