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- Convenors:
-
Alexandra Endaltseva
(CNRS)
Michael Guggenheim (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Asaf Bachrach (CNRS)
Send message to Convenors
- Chair:
-
Jan-Peter Voß
(RWTH Aachen University)
- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
Short Abstract:
How to care for sustainable eating in STS research? How to know with senses, affects, food work, and transformations that an eating body contains? This is an invitation to collectively investigate these questions by cooking, eating, and relating our experiences.
Long Abstract:
While food and eating are in need of systemic, and lasting changes (1), the dominant models of food transition are based on moral control and expertise-driven regulation, dissociated from the eaters’ sensory-affective knowledge, bodies, and reflexivity (2,3). This panel approaches eating as a collective and care-full meaning-making practice where minds, bodies, societies, and environments co-transform (4,5). We propose to explore how STS research can care for eating bodies when tackling food transition. We invite participants to share stories and analyses of engagements with food, bringing forth sensorial perceptions (taste, vision, haptics, synesthetic, etc), relational embeddings (in situations, broader material-semiotic arrangements and orders), diverse evaluations (delight, disgust, and more), labor, and care. The submissions can take the form of ethnographies, analytical observations, methodological reflections, presented as stories, dances, images, or multi-sensorial experiences. The panel will be composed of two sessions. First, we will cook a collective meal, guided by a score. The dishes, created in small groups using ingredients and utensils brought by the participants, will embody our different concerns. We will share this meal at the lunch break. During the second session, we will go deeper into the respective engagements in the form of speculative cartography of food transition, supported by images, accounts, and/or multi-sensorial stories from our research.
1.Spaargaren, G., Oosterveer, P.& Loeber, A. (E.) (2012). Food Practices in Transition: Changing Food Consumption, Retail and Production in the Age of Reflexive Modernity.
2.Mol, A. (2013). Mind your plate! The ontonorms of Dutch dieting. Social Studies of Science, 43(3).
3.Voß, J., & Guggenheim, M. (2019). Making Taste Public: Industrialized Orders of Sensing and the Democratic Potential of Experimental Eating. Politics and Governance, 7(4).
4.Mol, A. (2021) Eating in theory.
5.Abbots, E.-J., Lavis, A., & Attala, L. (E.). (2015). Careful eating : Bodies, food and care.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Branwyn Poleykett (UVA)
Short abstract:
Global narratives about food transitions often flatten out and simplify the complexities and struggles of eating in the present. Focusing on the multiple meanings of millet in Dakar, Senegal, I ask how encounters with millets tastes, textures, meanings and uses, bring eating futures into focus.
Long abstract:
Global narratives about transitions towards a future in which eating is secure, sustainable, and rooted in local ecologies often flatten out and simplify the complexities and struggles of eating in the present. These narratives give people little sense of how a future food policy will meaningfully mitigate a food context characterized not by unwarranted or unsustainable abundance, but by loss and struggle. Beginning from the West African city of Dakar and drawing on long term ethnographic research with food insecure households, this paper explores how a precarious present provides interpretative lenses and templates for imagined future nourishment that deconstruct and undermine ongoing interventions to promote food security and sovereignty. I focus on the multiple meanings of millet: a grain that stands for official and institutionalised aspirations of “good” eating in the future, while also forming part of survival strategies in the present. Empirically I examine everyday encounters with millets’ tastes, textures, affordances and limitations. Conceptually I experiment with decentering descriptions of these encounters as primarily “critical”, exploring the other registers and repertoires through which millet is interpreted.
Shuhua Chen (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
Short abstract:
Probing 'eating sufficiency' as a transformative approach to envisioning climate futures, this paper offers an auto-ethnographic illustration, weaving threads of ancient Chinese ecological philosophy into the fabric of my everyday food practices while conducting fieldwork in China.
Long abstract:
"Chewing as slowly as I can, my sense of taste in this very moment becomes so sensitive that it appears capable of detecting even the subtlest flavors, much like an infant experiencing unadulterated and unalloyed delight. It was the state of contentment that, in this instance, allowed my taste to discern even tastelessness. For the first time over the course of my experiment of ‘eating sufficiency,’ I taste what the Tao Te Ching (Chapter 63) calls ‘tasting the tasteless.’" In this paper, I probe the concept of ‘sufficiency’ from ancient philosophy to modern deep ecology, framing it as both a fundamental objective and a practical approach for achieving reduced consumption while attaining contentment with having ‘enough.’ In ancient Chinese philosophy, ‘sufficiency’ emphasizes contentment attained through the moderation of desires, prioritization of virtues over material wealth, and cultivation of harmonious relationships for personal and societal well-being. In an attempt to breathe life into the concept of ‘sufficiency,’ in this paper, I provide an auto-ethnographic illustration, weaving threads of ancient Chinese ecological philosophy into the fabric of my everyday food practices during ethnographic fieldwork in China in 2023 for the ‘MidWay’ (A Middle Way? Probing Sufficiency through Meat and Milk in China) project.
Alisa Goikhman (Technische Universität Berlin) Karina Astrid Abdala Moreira (Università degli studi di Torino)
Short abstract:
Algorithms shape our culinary desires, yet we struggle to digitalize the complexity of taste as a synthetic sense. We will collaborate with AI to imagine Dutch Hummus and examine cultural tensions and our collective embodied sense-making, delving into the nuances of machine translation of food.
Long abstract:
Against the backdrop of international migration reaching an all-time high and the global food system blurring cultural boundaries while pushing planetary limits, our culinary desires and preferences are frequently shaped by global trends disseminated by the virality of digital culinary resources, such as recipes and Foodporn images. These trends are steered by algorithms, on media and through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Natural language processing (NLP) models, such as ChatGPT, DALL·E, are trained on human-generated datasets. When tasked with generating a dish, they mirror back to us the average interpretation of desired food. The resulting texts (i.e., recipes) and images often fall into the Uncanny Valley. Digitalizing a synesthetic sense like taste necessitates the comprehension and translation of all senses—a feat currently beyond the capabilities of state-of-the-art AI.
In this playful co-creation session, we aim to tap into our collective and embodied experience of “Good Food”. To complement the disembodied AI, we will explore the taste experience according to Peirce’s (1839-1914) semiotic theory, as well as the tensions between diverse and culturally embedded Food Values (Lusk, Briggmann, 2009), and the evolving notion of locality and authenticity with the concept of Glocality (Robertson, 1994), as digital foods traverse various geographic and cultural contexts.
Together, we will explore the role of cultural and ideological stereotypes as they manifest in food. Utilizing AI to imagine what Dutch Hummus might taste and look like, what is lost, and what could be found in machine translation of food.
Type: Hands-on co-creation
Duration scaleable: 20-45 minutes
Nina de Bakker (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Short abstract:
Food that's good for you may not be good for me. Based on ethnographic research with neighbourhood initiatives in Amsterdam Southeast, this contribution invites joint exploration of what ‘good food’ may constitute (discursively, materially) and the actions and power dynamics associated therewith
Long abstract:
Transitions around food and its surrounding systems are a hot topic and widely presented as a necessary ground for change (Spaargaren et al., 2012; Béné et al., 2019; Fanzo et al., 2021). However, the direction and concepts on which such change is based differ greatly. Within my research in Amsterdam Southeast, often classified as a vulnerable neighbourhood with many low SES households (Gemeente Amsterdam, 2022; Dekker, 2011), I explore the plurality of different narratives surrounding (‘good’) food that figure therein and how these ideas contrast and/or live in tension with dominant policy norms. Where local policies are often direct towards nutritious and healthy eating, dieting, and controlling what you eat (see also Mol, 2013), Amsterdam Southeast showed me: candy can be healthy, meat can take care of your identity and how and where foodstuffs are produced can define their value. These very different ideas of what food can and should also be, lead to different priorities and hence actions regarding food transitions. Through various ethnographic methods I would like to further explore with you the meaning and different dimensions of ‘good food’. I bring along the stories and ‘data’ from my fieldwork (photo’s, film, sound, dishes, plants?), which we can work with and bring in contrast with existing dominant (governmental/Western) ideas on this topic.
Jade Henry (University College London) Nadine Tanio (UC Irvine) Sharon Traweek (University of California, Los Angeles UCLA)
Short abstract:
After participating in the preparation of a shared meal, we contribute to the making of a speculative cartography by presenting a story about an undergraduate seminar on terroir, taste, and the politics of difference.
Long abstract:
Responding to university initiatives to enhance campus “Dialogues across Difference”, we designed an educational intervention focusing on how distinctions are created through terroir, or connections between taste and place [1,2]. What makes “excellent” food and wine: is it due to the soil, climate, vines, barrels, reputation, scientific innovation, folk beliefs? How do such quests for excellence exclude certain producers and consumers [3]? How do they promote new tastes from new places? Our seminar in Food Studies introduced undergraduates to terms, sensibilities, and strategies for attuning to and engaging with the sensorial, affective, and material dimensions of difference. Through tasting exercises and conversations with invited experts, we explored:
+Historical and contemporary debates on terroir and taste
+How differences in taste can heighten discernment, pleasure, and conviviality, as well as anxiety, tensions, and contestation
+How and why food “connoisseurs” attune to difference rather than sameness
+How “good taste” is legitimized, taught, and monetized
+Why cultivating a sensorial awareness of the kinds of differences that make a difference might be preferable to looking up rankings based on algorithmic averages of what can be counted [1,4].
We will contribute to the making of the speculative cartography on food transition by sharing a multi-modal story about this pedagogical encounter [5]. We present dialogues that emerged when students, academics, and industry professionals explored distinction through embodied, relational, and more-than-human practices, imagining the care-full ways that “tasting the difference” might intervene in more contentious conversations within the university and beyond.
[1] Bateson, G. (1970). Form, substance and difference. Essential readings in biosemiotics, 501.
[2] Trubek, A. B. (2009). The taste of place: a cultural journey into terroir. University of California Press.
[3] Sørensen, K.H., and Traweek, S. (2022). Questing excellence in academia: a tale of two
universities. Routledge.
[4] Chayka, K. (2024). Filterworld: how algorithms flattened culture. Penguin/Random House.
[5] Tanio, N. (2020). Coming of age in high-tech medicine: heart transplantation, collaborative visual storytelling and transformational pedagogy. University of California, Los Angeles.
[6] Nicholls, E. J., Henry, J. V., & Dennis, F. (2021). ‘Not in our name’: vexing care in the neoliberal university. Nordic Journal of Science and Technology Studies, 65–76.
markus binner
Short abstract:
"E-Guitar with Sauces" brings 9 short guitar pieces and 9 sauces to the stage. A sauce for each piece, a piece for each sauce. I will do the sauces.
Long abstract:
While listening, the sauce spreads in my mouth, I smell it. E-guitar sounds and sauces are fundamentally similar. Just as acoustic space and mouthspace are similar in dimension and immediacy - both are sudden and infinite.
Just as cooking, probably the oldest artform, is a prerequisite for the eating community and thus for any kind of community, music has only been conceivable as a social phenomenon since the Stone Age (Igneous Rocks, What's Up, Doc?, Bogdanovic, 1972).
Even if the encounters between music and food are rather rare, and when they are, they tend to be supportive there are many historical and conceptual parallels: be it the turn towards the local, the regional, or the handmade of recent times or, before that, the enthusiasm for technology.
"E-Guitar with Sauces" brings 9 short guitar pieces and 9 sauces to the stage. A sauce for each piece, a piece for each sauce. The idea came from Zappa's noodly guitar playing. Together, Ribas and Binner developed sauces and pieces together, referring to each other, exploring different relationships: accompanying, contrasting, cancerous, priming, running into each other...
Musically and sauce-wise, it's a colorful evening - the strictness of the instrumentation and texture is juxtaposed with a range of different music and sauces.
Just as the flavorful density and complexity of sauces is created through the stimulation of ever-changing chemical reactions, guitar playing is condensed through loops that build up, through simultaneous, technically different feedback methods. Tone and sauce are extended, layered, drifting, straddling.
juliet tempest (Stanford University)
Short abstract:
Caring for interlocutors sometimes meant suspending self-care while I researched taste experiences at a processed meats factory outside Kuala Lumpur. In this presentation, I will reflect on eating foods with my interlocutors that they considered bad for them—and often made me feel bad, too.
Long abstract:
My paper explains how food does not always “do care” (Harbers, Mol, and Stollmeyer 2002). Studying taste at and around a processed meats factory outside Kuala Lumpur, I discovered that eating some foods pitted two forms of care against each other: tending to the embodied experiences of my interlocutors alongside my own. This conflict I faced as a researcher encapsulates the quotidian struggles of my interlocutors in Malaysia, modern consumers striving to eat well within social contexts abundant with foods they consider bad for them (Guthman 2015).
The factory’s Malaysian women workers belonged to the target demographic for the chicken nuggets they taste-tested. Yet these foods, which they called “unhealthy,” no longer appetized them; the obligation to continue eating such products indicated the factory’s lack of care. Taking care of themselves meant not eating (Mol 2021). They spit out half-chewed bites over trash cans, even skipped tasting altogether for the occasional batch, or thrusted a tray of nuggets at me instead: “You try.” I ate so my interlocutors did not have to proceed farther down another path of “slow death” (Berlant 2007). But the care I showed them resulted from denying myself that same form of self-care they applied to themselves.
To make sense of these events, I reflect on my positionality as a PhD student from the US accustomed to cooking her meals. I thus contextualize my embodied experiences of eating with my Malaysian interlocutors at the factory and outside, as further evidence of food’s ambivalent relationship to care.
Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer (Charles University) Katerina Hola
Short abstract:
This multimodal presentation examines the potentials, tensions, and limits of enacting more equitable and sustaining futures through learning to cook Romani dishes with Romani women in a series of cooking workshops.
Long abstract:
In a world that has exceeded the limit of 1.5C warming over a 12-month period, how can we nurture the practices of informal food provisioning, minor acts of solidarity and repair not written into state policies that Smith and Jehlicka (2013) name ‘quiet sustainability’? This multimodal presentation examines the potentials, tensions, and limits of enacting more equitable and sustaining futures through learning to cook Romani dishes with Romani women in a series of cooking workshops. What could it mean to approach a just transformation through the lens – and the taste – of Romani recipes and a cooking epistemology that improvises with what is at hand? How might we face our entangled inheritances when Roma cuisine, like Romani language, is disappearing and with it a whole way of living?
Our culinary lecturers’ desire to share Roma history with us, their white sous chefs, was evident in the constant detours of stories connecting a meal’s ingredients with past events and circumstances. Drawing on fieldnotes, video recordings, and interviews we trace the visceral, sensuous, and material registers and atmospheres in which connections and disconnections of cooking-eating-thinking (Heldke 1992) were performed. This does not only concern the kinaesthetic movements and remembrance in the hands, ‘the mouth machine’ (Probyn 2000) and tongue but also required contending with unequal metabolic inheritances and the biochemical chatter of foodstuffs, microbes and intestines (Landecker 2020) and the climate of anti-blackness (Sharpe 2016).
Leena Naqvi (Umeå Institute of Design, Umeå University)
Short abstract:
Airmailing culture is a project exploring embodied design through the practice of yogurt making in the Indian subcontinent.
Long abstract:
Airmailing culture is a project exploring embodied design through the practice of yogurt making in the Indian subcontinent. The project investigates how food practices are conditioned by human and more-than-human entanglements. It opens the discussion on ontological design by asking to what extent our practices effect the environment and to what extent the environments we inhabit effect our practices. As Anne-Marie Willis, design theorist, said, “We design our world, while our world acts back on us and designs us”.
The project is rooted in the early 20th century practice of smearing ParAvion envelopes with yogurt, drying them and then mailing them to diasporic communities to use as yogurt starters for a taste of the familiar, acidic yogurt. Were these acts of care in fact doing the opposite for the environment by introducing new microbial elements? What was the unmaking in the making of this culture?
I explore Airmailing culture using participatory methods- by dissipating the cultured yogurt smeared on an envelope amongst willing testers to start their own yogurts. Typical yogurt from the Indian subcontinent has a pungent acidic smell, followed by a tart taste. A workshop with the testers follows. Starting with a sniff test to determine acidity, followed by tasting, the airmailing culture workshop relies on gathering data on the types of milk and methods used by the participants to start their own yogurt cultures.
This project explores the nuances of culture through human and more-than-human interactions and through making, investigates the acts of care and labour.
Anna Geliev (RWTH Aachen)
Short abstract:
What is happening when we experience taste? When/where does taste start/end? How does the composition of individual taste elements influence the sensory-aesthetic experience of taste? Through autoethnography, I examine taste as practice, using my body as a self-experiment.
Long abstract:
Taste transcends mere physical reaction; it encompasses a rich sensory-aesthetic experience that extends beyond the palate. This paper explores taste beyond mere flavor perception, delving into questions of its onset, duration, sensory aspects, composition, and factors influencing alterations. Through autoethnography, taste is examined as a dynamic practice, illuminating sensory experiences.
Central to this exploration is the notion that the body plays a pivotal role in either rejecting or accepting taste, underscoring the intimate relationship between sensory perception and bodily engagement. Through the stimulation of the senses, taste experiences are intricately woven into the fabric of everyday life.
Moreover, this paper underscores that experiences are not passive occurrences but rather actively practiced. By engaging in intentional sensory experiences and individuals shape, contributing to the dynamic interplay between perception and action.
This study offers a nuanced examination of taste as a sensory phenomenon, emphasizing the role of embodiment, sensory stimulation, and practice in shaping our lived experiences. Grounded in the perspective of taste as a practice, the paper adopts an autoethnographic approach, considering the author's own body as self-experimentation. Through this methodological lens, the paper provides insights into the personal and embodied dimensions of taste, enriching scholarly discourse on sensory experiencess.
1. Reckwitz, A. (2015) Sinne und Praktiken. Die sinnliche Organisation des Sozialen.
2. Reckwitz, A. (2016) Praktiken und ihre Affekte.
3. Vannini, P. (2012) The senses in self, society, and culture. A sociology of the senses.
4. Vannini, P.(2012) The senses in self, society, and culture. A sociology of the senses.
Gwénaëlle Plédran
Short abstract:
What if cows, symbol of rurality and traditions, became the model of our food production? What if... we took cows as a model to integrate the notions of pleasure, social impact and unique taste experience into our diet? It is an invitation to reinvent our relationship with nature.
Long abstract:
Fermentation, the transformation of matter by specific micro-organisms, is experiencing a revival today. Low energy consumption, developing health benefits, this transformation resonates with current considerations of ecology, economy and better living by highlighting a complex and invisible biodiversity, inviting us to rethink our know-how, our tastes and our gestures. At the frontier design and science, working with fermentation means collaborating with the living and recognizing a non-human culture, decolonizing our views and setting up new means of production.
A cow eats the grass of the pasture, ruminates, digests and transmits the properties of the terroir to the milk it produces. An ultra-local qualitative process of fermentation. What if this principle was the basis for a rediscovery of the terroir, the soil/bacteria/plant ecosystem, bringing a specificity of taste and an expression of locality? How can we encourage everyone to change the way they look at the world around them, based on unique taste experiences, synthesizing the notions of pleasure, ecological and social impact?
Fermentation does not require any external energy supply, as the bacteria naturally present spontaneously transform the food. It is therefore a universal, economical and ecological process. Generating essential nutrients, it is also a lever for a healthy and sustainable diet.
The social dimension of certain fermented products also makes it the food expression of a "sharing economy". The cow-biomimetic model is a fiction of a possible food transformation model, working jointly on food and imaginary, in order to bring us to think today, a food renewal for tomorrow.
Madelaine Ley (Delft University of Technology)
Short abstract:
Blending philosophy of care ethics and attention with poetry and personal stories, this paper examines how the smooth and sensory-diminished user experience of online grocery shopping distances us from the life that is our food and the lives that grow, harvest, organize, and distribute our food.
Long abstract:
Vibrant social and sensory experience of gathering food is becoming more rare as many of us now get food to the door by a swipe-tap-buy of the thumb, an invisible exchange of money, and a quick delivery. Since online grocery shopping eliminates having to go to a physical store, it is touted as increasing convenience, accessibility, and sustainability.
I believe something more sinister is also occurring: the smooth digital experience of buying groceries through a screen distances us further from the life that is our food and the life that grows, harvests, organizes, and distributes our food. This contributes to moral deskilling (Vallor, 2015), as we are less likely to cultivate caring and attentive relationship with this life. Caring attention is essential for care and, I argue, involves epistemological, affective and imaginative elements. Often we have to be disrupted our of our habits to enter into this kind of attention, but the smooth and sensory-diminished user experience of online shopping avoids this kind of shake-up by prioritizing efficiency and optimization.
The paper acknowledges that grocery technology is not a singular problem, but an extension of a larger worldview based on separation, dominance and disconnect. Emerging into a more caring food system would not only require radical changes at the highest political and organizational levels, but also small shifts in the experience people have of gathering their meals.
Christian Ribas
Short abstract:
"E-Guitar with Sauces" brings 9 short guitar pieces and 9 sauces to the stage. A sauce for each piece, a piece for each sauce. I will do the music.
Long abstract:
While listening, the sauce spreads in my mouth, I smell it. E-guitar sounds and sauces are fundamentally similar. Just as acoustic space and mouthspace are similar in dimension and immediacy - both are sudden and infinite.
Just as cooking, probably the oldest artform, is a prerequisite for the eating community and thus for any kind of community, music has only been conceivable as a social phenomenon since the Stone Age (Igneous Rocks, What's Up, Doc?, Bogdanovic, 1972).
Even if the encounters between music and food are rather rare, and when they are, they tend to be supportive there are many historical and conceptual parallels: be it the turn towards the local, the regional, or the handmade of recent times or, before that, the enthusiasm for technology.
"E-Guitar with Sauces" brings 9 short guitar pieces and 9 sauces to the stage. A sauce for each piece, a piece for each sauce. The idea came from Zappa's noodly guitar playing. Together, Ribas and Binner developed sauces and pieces together, referring to each other, exploring different relationships: accompanying, contrasting, cancerous, priming, running into each other...
Musically and sauce-wise, it's a colorful evening - the strictness of the instrumentation and texture is juxtaposed with a range of different music and sauces.
Just as the flavorful density and complexity of sauces is created through the stimulation of ever-changing chemical reactions, guitar playing is condensed through loops that build up, through simultaneous, technically different feedback methods. Tone and sauce are extended, layered, drifting, straddling.
Martin Winter (HS Fulda)
Short abstract:
Meat production and consumption practices have been criticised, leading to a call for a 'protein transition' The presentation examines three distinct ontologies: culinary, ecological and nutritional materiality. A dominance of nutritional materiality characterises the protein transition.
Long abstract:
Meat production and consumption practices have been criticised, leading to a call for a 'protein transition'. This study analyses the discursive practices of vegan/vegetarian NGOs, lobby groups, and companies in the field of meat alternatives. It discusses the 'ontological politics' (Annemarie Mol) involved in the production of meat alternatives.
On a broader level, the presentation examines three distinct materialities: The first is culinary materiality, which is based on flavour, consistency, texture, and appearance. The second is ecological materiality, which places food in a broader spatial and temporal context, focusing on the relationship between food and its production history, as well as the future implications of its production and consumption. And third, nutritional materiality is closely linked to nutritional science. Food is broken down into individual biochemical components, resulting in quantifiable objects of knowledge.
Regarding the protein transition, the findings suggest a change: meat substitutes are marketed to 'flexitarians', who reduce their meat intake without completely abstaining from meat. Therefore, these alternatives are primarily promoted as sources of protein, enacting it as a nutritional materiality. Meat and its substitutes are often considered interchangeable sources of protein associated with physical strength and traditional masculinity. This finding raises concerns about the promotion of a more sustainable diet and its potential reproduction of societal power dynamics.
Asaf Bachrach (CNRS) Alexandra Endaltseva (CNRS)
Short abstract:
This is a demonstration of our work in progress. We will share stories-in-the-making, images, and speculative impressions from the participatory living lab eco-SIT [Sense, Imagine, Transform], which offers sense-full experiments with French teenagers for a new ecological imaginary.
Long abstract:
Imagine a living lab where young adults engage in sense-full experimentation with the world, rediscovering the senses and imaginaries of eating, moving, and gardening for more livable futures. Imagine a collaborative space where participants unlearn and relearn what it means to live "sustainably". This is the collective vision we are cultivating in south west France, bringing together local associations and researchers in the living lab eco-SIT [Sense, Imagine, Transform].
At the core of our endeavor lies an initiative designed by and for adolescents, aimed at fostering new imaginaries and sensitivities to enhance the role and engagement of young adults in addressing the ecological crisis. We begin from the premise that the environmental crisis is fueled, in part, by a crisis of sense-ability – the capacity to sense the world and respond with care for these senses. Moreover, we insist that the crisis of sensitivity is intertwined with a crisis of imagination ('it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism' - Mark Fisher).
To address this complex web of challenges, we recognize the necessity of cultivating new imaginaries. Collaborating with young adults in rural areas, we facilitate monthly imagination workshops centered around four themes: Sensing the living (embracing gardening, permaculture, and forest walks), sensing taste (exploring eating and cooking), and sensing movement (engaging in dance improvisation).
In our contribution to the panel, we aim to share preliminary insights gleaned from four meetings of our living lab, presenting them through images, anecdotes, and reflective impressions.