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Accepted Paper:

Creating space for multi-vocality in climate change impacted food security and food sovereignty in Vanuatu  
Emily Crawford (University of Sydney)

Paper short abstract:

This research aims to build an expanded view of food and nutritional security and sovereignty efforts in contemporary Vanuatu, viewing the 2015 tropical cyclone Pam as a point of rupture. In making space for multi-vocal foodways & contemporary identity, how may not only different groups of people but multiple species and entities be included and considered?

Paper long abstract:

This paper seeks to highlight the ways that ‘food’ is deeply tied to notions of kastom and as central to the ongoing crafting of contemporary identity and ni-Vanuatu personhood. Gardening and agriculture is often framed as a ‘parenting’ of the land and of plants, requiring a deep engagement with more-than-human entities, ancestors and more, yet food aid during disasters may simultaneously be framed as creating ongoing disasters of NDC’s and a growing reliance on introduced foodstuff.

Engagements with food production attends to notions of agency in the land, plant-human kinship systems and cosmologies, and is seen as spiritually, socially and bodily nourishing. The contemporary Siloa Slow Food Vanuatu Association is working to preserve and promote traditional foodways and a continuation of such nourishment and values, resisting introduced food related values. However, I argue there are significant gendered implications and considerations to be made. This paper seeks to illuminate women’s emplaced plant, gardening and food stories, and sing up both men and women’s intimate relationships with the plants they so deeply rely on for nourishment. It pays particular attention to the grounded ways that women bargain for power through food in public and private domains, complicating universalized prescriptions of human-rights based approaches to participation.

As the climate changes, and as the ‘taste of place’ shifts, particularly in urban Port Vila, food related notions of gendered personhood, power, identity and agency are being reconfigured and creatively ‘remixed.’ Applying a feminist and multi-species lens to build a polyphonic view of food as much more than sustenance, this work engages with sensory ethnography and creative methods to explore alternative food futures and to make audible, visible, or even taste-able, the frictions between past, contemporary and future values, food voices and hungers.

Panel P20
Life and death, sacred and secular: thinking with and beyond species in a more-than-human world
  Session 1 Tuesday 3 December, 2019, -