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- Convenors:
-
Pallavi Laxmikanth
(Australian National University)
Tyler Riordan (University of Queensland)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Material Worlds
- Location:
- NIKERI KC2.208
- Sessions:
- Friday 25 November, -
Time zone: Australia/Melbourne
Short Abstract:
This panel explores the politics of emerging infrastructures (digital and physical) that support the consumption, packaging, marketing and movement of food. We invite submissions that interrogate digitally mediated modalities of food consumption, production and marketing, and forms of labour.
Long Abstract:
Unprecedented forms of digital and supporting infrastructures, logics and socialities are emerging that are transforming food, its packaging, marketing, consumption, and labour forms and relations. COVID-19 has created an increased need for food businesses and consumers to access each other and build relationships in new ways. An array of new terminologies now enable digital socialities and consumption; from 'contactless delivery', to 'check-ins', and 'sanitization protocols'. New products and infrastructures such as portable packaging options, instagram-friendly cafes, ingredient starter kits, meal subscription services, cloud kitchens, app-based delivery tracking, and algorithmic management support the mediated movement of food.
Platformization and digitally situated consumption, while opening up possibilities for fresh food from businesses to reach people locally, place demands on foods, supply chains and precarious workers. Concerns around food safety, quality, healthfulness, taste and affordability arise. Lockdowns, issues in supply chains, and food shortages have highlighted inequities in access to food. In light of these disruptions, food infrastructures are increasingly regarded as 'essential'; moving from being a matter of 'convenience' to enabling 'life support'. Consequently, these interventions resurface ethical questions surrounding food storage, waste, sustainability, worker exploitation, and monopolies held by large-scale food corporations and industries.
We invite submissions that interrogate digitally mediated forms of food consumption which include but are not limited to: platformization, COVID-19, shifting socialities, transformation in large-scale industries and supply chains, food safety, health, sustainability, accessibility, workforce precarity, digital consumption, marketing, portability and the movement of food.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 24 November, 2022, -Pallavi Laxmikanth (Australian National University)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I explore how oil and its viscerality is used to gauge food quality and business sanitary ethics, informing choice in app-based food ordering.
Paper long abstract:
Hyderabad has been marked by dramatic changes in the last two decades with the rise of the IT industry. Increased consumption, technological sub-cultures, stress and metabolic disease is the urban landscape in which app-based food delivery, more recently, has established its stronghold. Oil — floating as a layer over the food, its rancid smell wafting from deep fried street meat, or sticking to one’s fingers as it leaks through packaging — these visceral engagements characterized experiences of app-based food ordering, revealing participant considerations of quality, health, sanitation and safety, not just of foods but the businesses they came from. In this paper, I explore how choices for food consumption are made online, among middle-class, IT employed professionals with type 2 diabetes. Through interviews with participants and food businesses using app-based delivery to sell their products, I interrogate the circulating rhetorics around oil and its viscerality, and how it is used to decipher whether a food is from ‘outside’ and is safe, edible and healthy to eat. ‘Known’ establishments and familiar foods were preferred over unknown establishments and unfamiliar foods and business ethics were articulated through the quality of oil, its reuse and abuse. Attending to oil and its viscerality holds promise in understanding consumer preferences and contributing to existing conversations around ‘fat’ and its problematization in Global North nutritional discourses.
Victoria Stead (Deakin University)
Paper short abstract:
Digital technologies increasingly figure in the futures that the Australian horticultural industry imagines for itself. These imagined food futures invoke both hopes and anxieties for growers, workers and agri-investors, and portend diverse and uneven terrains of belonging and possession.
Paper long abstract:
Digital technologies—from blockchain to smart farm applications, AI-driven robotics and digitally-mediated compliance and accreditation platforms—increasingly figure in the futures that the Australian horticultural industry imagines for itself. In their engagements with these technologies—both actually-existing and anticipated—growers and agri-investors pursue visions of connectivity, traceability and efficiency. Digital technologies are held out as keys to accessing long-desired, if often elusive, export markets for Australian fruit and vegetables, to attracting skilled workforces, and to shoring up the industry in the face of generational change. At the same time, digital technologies and infrastructures intrude upon and interrupt established forms of production, relationships between people, and relationships between people and environments, in ways that can also be experienced by growers as deeply troubling. In this paper, I identify both the digital hopes and anxieties that circulate within the horticultural sector, and inquire into the terrains of belonging and possession that these imagined food futures portend.
Tyler Riordan (University of Queensland)
Paper short abstract:
Hospitality typically involves social relations between people that take place in the private, social, and commercial domains. However – based on my ethnography with migrant food delivery workers - I propose that a new domain of mediated hospitality is needed to better understand experiences in a blended world.
Paper long abstract:
Hospitality typically involves social relations between people that take place in the private, social, and commercial domains. Recent scholarly attention suggests that hospitality provides a useful lens to explore the ways humans interact in virtual settings. However - based on ethnographic fieldwork with migrant food delivery workers in Brisbane, Australia - I propose that a new fourth domain of mediated hospitality is required to better understand how interactions take place in an increasingly blended world. Building on Carmargo’s (2003) concept of virtual hospitality, this approach is useful to better understand how food delivery workers experience processes like algorithmic management, surveillance tracking, digital reviews, and ‘contactless’ delivery. Such exchanges are mediated by a third party or object (human or non-human) and can take place online or offline (or both). However, I argue that all interactions begin and end with a relationship (or lack thereof) between humans – the core tenet of hospitality.
Liz Norsa (University of Sydney)
Paper short abstract:
This presentation considers how to approach an ethnography of food-sharing in crisis circumstances. What concepts enable us to unpack ethnographic detail of food shared between neighbours, families and community organisation/s—disentangling embodied practice from the visceral to the virtual.
Paper long abstract:
The Delta COVID-19 outbreak in 2021 brought into relief Sydney’s existing inequities, showing that negative consequences are not distributed fairly and fall along existing social, political and economic fault lines. Whilst being part of the COVID contact tracing efforts, I heard how those isolating under Sydney’s strictest lockdown rules negotiated food access. I witnessed their distress from not being able to feed others or themselves. This presentation considers how to approach an ethnography of food-sharing in crisis circumstances. What conceptual frameworks enable us to unpack ethnographic detail of food shared between neighbours, families and community organisation/s—disentangling embodied practice from the visceral to the virtual. We have seen this pandemic give rise to social, cultural improvisations mediated by virtual places and actualised by the preparation and sharing food with those in need. The passing of ‘time’ is of import to distinguish what is generative, ephemeral and permanent. I will also critically reflect on my own repertoires, norms and improvisation whilst living through crises. My sojourn into the literature precedes fieldwork that will be undertaken in Sydney to investigate the structural drivers of inequity and document the lived experiences of this liminal phase as they are refracted around food.