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Paper short abstract

This paper reflects on creating a Russian and Ukrainian diaspora community cookbook as a teaching tool and form of public anthropology, showing how collaborative recipes reveal moral economies of care, belonging, and everyday politics.

Paper long abstract

This paper reflects on creating a Russian and Ukrainian diaspora community cookbook as a teaching tool and form of public anthropology, showing how collaborative recipes reveal moral economies of care, belonging, and everyday politics. In the current geopolitical context, food practices associated with Russian and Ukrainian cultures are increasingly moralized and nationalized, often flattened into symbols of identity or allegiance. This project treats the community cookbook not as a nostalgic or heritage object, but as an ethnographic method grounded in everyday cooking, family meals, and ordinary acts of care.

The cookbook emerges from participant observation in kitchens, shared meals, and routine food preparation, alongside informal conversations about taste, memory, and adaptation. Recipes are accompanied by short ethnographic reflections that document substitution, disagreement, and constraint. Debates over ingredients, naming, and acceptable variation are treated as ethnographic data rather than problems to be resolved. These moments illuminate how taste functions as a site of ethical judgment and boundary making within diasporic communities.

As a pedagogical practice, the cookbook positions participants including students, caregivers, and family members as co producers of knowledge, challenging extractive models of research and conventional academic dissemination. As a form of public anthropology, it circulates ethnographic insight through an accessible everyday medium that moves beyond the academy and into homes, classrooms, and community spaces. The paper argues that creating community cookbooks offers a scalable methodology for translating anthropological analysis into public engagement, allowing critical perspectives on food, care, and politics to circulate without reproducing culinary nationalism or depoliticized nostalgia.

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Narrated through comics that cast food as an actor, this project draws on ethnography of Vienna’s social markets to explore how food shifts identity across spaces, mediating neoliberal welfare, moral economies, and practices of social and spatial exclusion.

Paper long abstract

With my comics, I tell a reciprocal story: the end of one food item is the beginning of another. The same piece of food changes its identity quickly and radically, depending on where it is placed and which people surround it. It can be touched, evaluated, ignored, desired, protected, or thrown away. In these comics, food is not just an object but an actor: a tourist, a soldier, a weapon, a poison, and a tool shaped by ideologies, politics, and policies.

The project is based on my ethnographic research on social markets in Vienna - special supermarkets for low-income people where expired food is sold at reduced prices. In this system, food moves from an “ordinary” supermarket to a hybrid space that imitates a regular shop but functions under different rules. This movement is often framed through ideas of sustainability and care, yet it also produces separation, control, and unequal access.

One narrative follows a lemon trying to understand itself. Once unwanted and invisible in a regular supermarket, it becomes valuable and desirable in a social market, where strict rules regulate how many items can be taken and who may touch them. The lemon does not understand why it is suddenly protected, restricted, and watched.

Through this story, I explore how food constantly shifts between value and waste, care and neglect. By telling ethnographic research through comics, I aim to show how food mediates emotions, power, dignity, and exclusion in everyday life. (I can send comics if requested).

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Based on my food installation, the paper presents a social encounter that reimagines the living room as a shared ecological commons. Through tasting as a method of inquiry into forgotten flavors and vernacular knowledge, this research explores how governmentality shapes what counts as edible.

Paper long abstract

Can we eat waste? This paper situates the notion of biosensory politics within Foucaultian governmentality. It examines how sensory practices, embodied perceptions, and material entanglements with the environment can become sites where self-regulatory processes emerge. These concepts are grounded in a participatory food installation conducted by the author at Dutch Design Week 2025. “Welcome to the Living Room” is a social encounter that invites visitors to a space where all beings - human and more-than-human - are welcomed as guests. By reimagining the domestic “living room” as a shared ecological commons, food becomes a medium of welcome, and tasting becomes an opportunity for dialogue between standardized regimes and localized experiences. However, as plants and their roots move across borders, whether through trade, migration, or accident, they can become invasive or be dismissed as waste. Such movement challenges the boundaries between native and foreign, edible and inedible, and care and control. Eating these plants is a way of negotiating what is welcomed, what is governed, and what is allowed to take root. In this sense, food becomes a form of world-making, where the politics of edibility permeates everyday life.

Building on these practice-based insights, this paper contributes to the field of environmental humanities, deepening the concept of biosensory politics. It therefore frames the living room as a porous space in which guests co-compose an edible landscape, opening up practical and theoretical avenues for imagining future food systems that promote ecological balance and collective sensibilities across human and more-than-human realms.

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This paper demonstrates how 'performing the archive' can be used to develop a 'global sense of place' among transnational publics. We do so by reflecting on the co-creation of a performance that invited diverse publics to think about the transnational and unfinished nature of the sugar industry.

Paper long abstract

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of United Kingdom Research and Innovation, the Living Histories of Sugar project (2019-2022) focused on the co-creation of a musical and theatrical performance that invited diverse publics from across the Atlantic to think about the transnational and unfinished nature of the sugar industry. The project involved a series of co-creation workshops with Caribbean and Scottish performance artists, resulting in original songs and biographical stories that worked ‘against the grain’ of written, aural, and visual archives. Our intention was to be open, honest and critical about the selection and use of historical and archival material, while identifying archives that could inspire artists and audiences alike to contest fragmentary and biased representations of the past and their implications for the present. The performance captured a range of people involved the trans-Atlantic sugar industry: from enslaved women in Jamaica, to the wives of Greenock’s sugar refinery workers, to young men working in Jamaica’s Frome sugar refinery run by Tate & Lyle in the 1970s. This paper situates our own reflections as scholars and performance artists in relation to insights from our audience members in Kingston and Greenock, who shared their own understandings, experiences, and feelings about sugar and slavery after the performance. The paper shows how 'performing the archive' can be used to develop what human geographer Doreen Massey calls a 'global sense of place' among diverse, transnational publics who are differentially entangled in the power geometries of colonial capital.

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Based on ethnographic fieldwork (participant observation, conversations), the paper depicts 3 food representation strategies of migrant communities in Poland such as culinary workshops, Georgian restaurants, and mutual cooking in refugee centres. It elaborates on power relations and integration.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines three food representation strategies employed by migrant communities in Poland and analyses their role in shaping integration, visibility, and power relations between migrants and the receiving society. Drawing on the anthropology of food, culinary practices are approached not merely as cultural expression but as social strategies embedded in unequal structures of perception and belonging.

The first strategy concerns culinary workshops aimed at Polish audiences, often led by Venezuelan and Colombian migrants. Organised by NGOs or individual entrepreneurs, these workshops translate and simplify culinary narratives to enhance accessibility and appeal. While they create spaces for intercultural encounter and economic agency, they also risk reducing complex food traditions and migration histories to pedagogical and consumable performances aligned with majority expectations.

The second strategy focuses on Georgian migrant gastronomy, which often maximises Polish imaginaries of Georgia as hospitable, Christian, exotic yet non-threatening. These restaurants tend to reinforce the exotisation of Georgian culture as a touristic experience rather than reflecting Georgia’s position as a major sending country to Poland.

The third strategy involves mutual cooking practices in refugee centres, where asylum seekers cook together as a form of care, solidarity, and survival. Typically inward-facing and occasionally supported by NGOs, these practices rely on minimal shared language, positioning food as a primary medium of communication rather than public representation.

The paper asks which of these strategies effectively bridge social divides and reduce polarisation toward migrants in Poland, and how they differently enable or constrain integration.

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How can we engage with food that does not exist yet? Based on ethnographic research on cultivated meat in Czechia, this paper discusses “public hearing” as a method for shaping public debate about opportunities, risks, and futures of novel food technologies.

Paper long abstract

Food anthropology has long called for mobilizing sensory-grounded engagement and embodied experiences to provoke experiments with food and “make taste public” (Voß & Guggenheim 2019). However, novel food technologies such as cultivated meat pose a challenge for both research and citizen participation: how can food be discussed and studied when it cannot yet be tasted?

This paper draws on ethnographic research on cultivated meat in Czechia, home to two startups developing this technology, where regulatory debates are emerging around the organization of the first sensory testing of cultivated meat products. As a special commission, established by national authorities, prepares testing protocols, we encounter a critical moment in which expectations, risks, and values are negotiated in the food’s “absent presence” (Callon & Law 2004).

As a social science intervention into the sociotechnological development of cultivated meat in Czechia, we are organizing a public hearing to be held in March 2026. It will bring together regulators, scientists, industry actors, and citizens to collectively examine technological nature and ethical, ecological, economic, and social implications of cultivated meat and its potential role in the transformation of the Czech food system and eaters’ plates. Rather than aiming for consensus or resolution, the format foregrounds uncertainties and speculations as productive elements of public engagement crucial for food democracy and sustainable food transitions. The paper reflects on the process and outcomes of the hearing and opportunities and pitfalls of shaping food futures beyond expert-driven governance, even when the food is still in the process of being assembled.

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This self-ethnography follows my shift from urban consumer to Beijing CSA intern. Through “entangled” encounters with insects, birds, and cats, I show that honestly narrating multispecies confusion is public anthropology, redirecting attention to eating ethics.

Paper long abstract

This paper presents a self-ethnography of my immersive participation in a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm in Beijing. As an urban consumer accustomed to the standardized produce of supermarkets, I entered this space not as a detached researcher but as a intern, using my own body and emotions as the primary tools of inquiry. This study documents my visceral journey of sensory and ethical recalibration, focusing on the concrete dilemmas that arose from daily multispecies encounters. I trace the transformation of my relationship with the farm’s insects, from an initial disgust toward “pests” to a hesitant observation of them as fellow inhabitants. I delve into the profound ethical paralysis I experienced when confronted with fallen magpie fledglings and roaming stray cats, moments that forced me to confront the limits of human agency within an ecological community. Furthermore, I contrast the therapeutic experience found in manual farmwork with the “affective labor” required to sustain member relations, revealing the often-unseen work that upholds alternative food networks.

I argue that the methodological practice of “staying with the trouble” by honestly narrating confusion and tension constitutes, in itself, a potent form of public anthropology. This self-ethnography invites the public into the lived, muddy reality of ethical food production, where the simple binary of “good” and “bad” collapses. Thus, the paper demonstrates how personal, embodied narrative can “re-educate public attention,” shifting discourse away from abstract consumer choice and toward a more complex, relational, and multispecies imagination of what “ethical eating” truly means.