Lecture
GTGC Lunch Seminar: Transformation and connections through food/waste in Dutch cities
- Date
- Monday 20 March 2023
- Time
- Location
- Wijnhaven
Turfmarkt 99
2511 DC Den Haag - Room
- 4.78
As part of the GTGC Lunch Seminars (Spring 2023), Elena Burgos Martinez, Jyothi Thrivikraman and Daniela Vicherat Mattar will present their work on Food Solidarity as part of a GTGC seed grant project. As transformation allows the possibility to imagine and learn other forms of being and living together, it implies change, and often exchange.
Their paper is based on a research carried out in 2021-2022 that, through a story-telling approach, examined the transformations and connections afforded when turning food waste into edible food. Conceptually, this paper takes a new-materialist approach focusing on the stories everyday objects tell about transforming food waste, and the connections these facilitate among different publics in The Hague and Leiden (Netherlands). Taking this approach was a methodological decision motivated by the will to resist the temptation of extracting and appropriating the life (hi)stories of people frequently perceived as vulnerable and labelled as “others”. Instead, this project objective has been un-settling the frontiers of what counts as food waste by paying attention to the objects involved in this process. As researchers we depart from the perspective that there are no “others” in this project, there are stories about connections and transformations of food waste told by the objects that make them possible.
We begin by positioning our research objectives in connection to broader discussions in the literature regarding food waste governance, management, and their associated infrastructures. In the second section we explain our methodological considerations and decisions to then move to a third section where the stories of the objects are told to unpack the ways in which they unsettle dominant practices related to food waste in The Hague and Leiden. Paying attention to these objects' stories is an important turn in sustainability research because it enables us to imagine alternative paths to engage in other forms of living together in contexts of increasingly precarious food systems.
Free lunch will be provided if you email your attendance to gtgc@leidenuniv.nl. We hope to welcome you!