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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.