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Paper short abstract

This paper explores the performative role of the table and commensality in enacting sustainability as oeconomia, developing a pedagogy for Creative Sustainability that fosters relational care, ecological awareness, and collective learning.

Paper long abstract

The paper draws on ethnographic vignettes and reflections from the first year of Creative Sustainability, an experimental undergraduate program set in a former home economics school for women in rural East Iceland. The aim is to explore the role of the table and the act of preparing a meal and eating together in developing a pedagogy that enacts sustainability as oikonomia, fostering relational care, ecological awareness, and collective learning.

In the Creative Sustainability program the table is more than an inanimate piece of furniture and meals are more than mere sustenance. The school building is embedded in a remote and marginal place, surrounded by forest and farms. Inside as well as outdoors, tables of various kinds gather students, teachers, and community members into a collective of learners. At the table students encounter cultural heritage, tradition and craft, as they learn through making, sharing, and handling materials. Berries from the forest, vegetables from local farms, or a homemade loaf of sourdough bread become entangled, and edible, narratives of pasts, presents and futures.

In the act of preparing and eating together, stories and memories are exchanged—about places, materials, tastes, former foraging trips, family traditions, and everyday craft practices. The practice of commensality enacts a pedagogy where food, materiality, remembrance and storytelling intertwine and cultivate attentiveness to ecological entanglements and cultural heritage. In this way, the table emerges as both a symbolic agent and a material teacher, anchoring learners in shared attentiveness to food, place, and the relational ethics of sustainability.