Seeing the translocal: Visual food methods and gendered cultural reproduction foodwork

A Food Researchers in Edinburgh (FRiED) Seminar.

Our speaker will be Dr Elaine Swan, Reader in Feminist Food Studies at the University of Sussex. One of Elaine’s main research interests is critical race and feminist food studies, and in this event she will be talking about work that is part of the ongoing UKRI funded Food Systems Equality (FoodSEqual) project. More about her work can be found here.

Abstract

In this talk, I draw on our qualitative study on the gendered, class and racialised foodwork of women in Tower Hamlets, London. This study forms part of the UKRI-funded FoodSEqual project and involves collaborations between Katerina Psarikidou from Sussex University and Shazna Hussain, and Sajna Miah community researchers from the Women’s Environmental network (WEN).  Our study comprises a range of methods, many of which include photography or film. Hence, we carried out a series of photography workshops; an exhibition; shop-alongs; cook-alongs; food photo diaries and interviews with local residents. Analysing the mediated visual representations of foodwork, we examine the diverse meanings of ‘local food’ within translocal communities, particularly focusing on ideas of gendered racialisation and the whiteness of food localism. Academics and activists food call for ‘alternatives’ to the industrial food system, paying attention to the ‘local’ as the ‘alternative’ to address the ‘socio-environmental’ deficits of globalised food systems. In many cases, the ‘local’ as some scholars critique, takes a narrow, situated, place-based approach, described as ‘defensive’ or ‘nativist’ localism (du Puis and Goodman, 2005).

Extending this critique, Jilimiz Valiente-Neigbours (2012) argues that these limited understandings of food localism, and scholarly discussions of these, neglect race. As a result, food localism can exclude ‘translocal subjectivities’ and ‘translocal communities’ such as the American Filipinos she studies. To expand understandings of ‘local-ness’, and build an inclusive food politics, in her view, requires an embodied, sensory and mobile understanding of ‘local-ness’ and transnationalism. In our paper, we build on Valiente-Neighbours’ argument but extend it by foregrounding gender and race, and mobilising growing feminist research on the politics of localism and the visual representation of cultural reproduction through food (for instance, Deutsch, 2011; Mares, 2017).

Based on our visual analysis, we examine the diverse meanings of ‘local food’ within translocal communities, particularly focusing on ideas of gendered racialisation and the whiteness of food localism.  We explore how dominant notions of localism neglect and potentially stigmatise gendered food practices of racially minoritised groups. In so doing, first, we challenge dominant ideas of ‘the local’ through an embodied, mobile, gendered and racialised understanding of ‘local-ness’ taking into account complex geographies of mobilities of people and food. Secondly, we raise questions about whether ‘access to local food’ (narrowly perceived) should be at the centre of addressing food inequalities in a racialised translocal context.

To join follow the link below and please note that the session will begin at 12.30pm with a Q&A about research methods hosted by the FRIED student network and Elaine’s talk will begin at 1pm.

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