Historically, “women have been doing the majority of the work of feeding families and feeding other people,” Brenton said. And that work is now more difficult, and sometimes more dangerous, than ever (North, 2020)
About Servings
Who we are.
Dr Elaine Swan is a critical race feminist food studies scholar based at the University of Sussex Business School, member of the Future of Work hub and a fellow of the Sussex Sustainability Research Programme. In Australia, she studied food social enterprises, particularly those with an intercultural dimension, and wrote a book and several articles on what she calls food pedagogies. Since moving back to London, she has been researching foodwork across various domains and working alongside the Women’s Environmental Network.
Our work.
Elaine works with ethnographic and qualitative methods, and recent work includes COVID-19 foodwork, race, gender, class and food justice: an intersectional feminist analysis; Foodwork: racialised, gendered and classed labours and a special issue on the Sensory politics of food pedagogies.
Digital imagery.
Participatory photography exercises enable minoritised groups to express their food worlds and selves through visual representations and capture some of their difficult to articulate food practices as well as helping to generate discussions around people’s experiences of food.
Our methods.
Our research methods are participatory, designed to de-centre the researcher’s authority and directiveness - allowing participants to lead on what they would like to say about their food lives.
Our impact.
By amplifying the voices of minoritised communities, and listening to ideas for food-related improvements to policies, food systems and products, those voices become an important part of changing the agenda around food.