School of Social and Political Science

Content

2024-2025 

• 16/10. 13:00 – 14:00:  Dr Ana Cabrera Pachero, School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh will share her work on the Ixchel Human Geography project which examines the use of traditional food recipes and plants by Indigenous Maya women in Guatemala in a post-disaster context.
• 20/11. 13:00-14:00: Professor Ashli Quesinberry Stokes, Interim Chair, Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies (WRDS), UNC Charlotte will talk about her new book Hungry Roots: How Food Communicates Appalachia's Search for Resilience. Part of the research for this book was conducted during Ashli’s time as a visiting fellow at IASH.
• 2/12. 15:00-18:00: ON CAMPUS festive FRIED winter gathering and seminar with Prof Francesca Bray, around her last book (Moving Crops and the Scales of History, which she co-wrote with Barbara Hahn, John Bosco Lourdusamy and Tiago Saraiva, published by Yale in 2023). The recording for Francesca's talk is HERE.
• 12/2 (POSTPONED). 13:00-14:30: Roundtable discussion (online) between Professor Kevin Morgan, Professor of Governance and Development, Cardiff University, and colleagues from the University of Edinburgh and elsewhere to mark the publication of Prof Morgan's new book Serving the Public: The good food revolution in schools, hospitals and prisons.  
• 12/3. 13:00-14:00: Josephine Heger, PhD researcher at Robert Gordon University: Rural food insecurity in Scotland: 'Coping with food insecurity in rural Scotland: insights from the lived experience of parents with young children'.
• 23/4. 13:00-14:00: Rachel Carlile, PhD researcher in SPS and Geography, and Dr Isabelle Darmon, lecturer in Sociology and Sustainable Development, both at the University of Edinburgh, will present their ongoing work on a conceptual review on the inequality-unsustainability nexus in the sustainability transitions/transformations of agrifood systems.

2023-2024

• 11/10 Dr Hannah Boast, Chancellor's Fellow at the University of Edinburgh: 'Planting Palestine'.
• 8/11 12-1pm (Joint GAAFS/FRIED seminar) Dr Sylvia Mitchell, Senior Lecturer at the University of the West Indies: Tailoring Biotechnology Towards Sustainable and Equitable Development.
• 15/11, 1-2pm Dr Coline Ferrant, Assistant Professor in Social Development & Policy at Habib University (Karachi, Pakistan). : 'Simple Cooking Using Fresh Produce: Immigrants’ Recraft of the Quotidian Diet in Paris and Chicago'.
• 6/12, 4-5pm Dr Matias Margulis, Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs & Faculty of Land and Food Systems, University of British Columbia: 'Shadow Negotiators: How UN Organizations Shape the Rules of World Trade for Food Security'. 

RECORDING EXCEPTIONALLY AVAILABLE. SEE HERE. The first 10' of Matias' presentation are without slides as we thought they were moving but they were not... but this was then put right.

• 14/2 exceptionally at 4pm due to time difference with Colorado. Dr Joshua Sbicca, Associate Professor of Sociology at Colorado State University: 'Food Justice Intersections: Finding Common Ground to Grow Movements'.
• 6/3. Dr Anthony Richards, 'From Africa to the Americas, and back? Caribbean foodways in slavery and freedom'. Dr Richards is a consultant in cultural landscape heritage for Wild Caribbean Ltd, based in Barbados.
• 15/5 Dr Alanna Higgins, Assistant Professor in the School of Geography at the University of Nottingham: 'Radical Legal Geographies of the Food Desert Spatial Imaginary'
• 3/6 Prof Alan Warde will give a public lecture on the occasion of the publication of his new book, Everyday Eating. Food, Taste and Trends in Britain since the 1950s with Bristol University Press (due May 2024).  

RECORDING AVAILABLE. SEE LINK HERE.

2022-2023

• 19/10  Dr Elaine Swan, Senior Lecturer at the Business School of the University of Sussex: 'Seeing the translocal: visual food methods and gendered cultural reproduction foodwork'.
• 9/11  Dr Katherine Cullerton, Senior Lecturer at the School of Public Health, The University of Queensland: 'Power and influence in food policy'.
• 11/1 Dr Iain Brownlee, Associate Professor of Nutrition at Northumbria University: 'Central eating: Application of diet quality scoring approaches to evaluate holiday club food provision'.
• 8/3 Dr Eva Haifa Giraud, Senior Lecturer in Digital Media & Society at the University of Sheffield: 'Digital Veganisms'.
• 28/3 FRIED public lecture ON CAMPUS (Business School Auditorium. 5-7PM): 'School Food- A Global Perspective', by Professor Donald Bundy, Professor of Epidemiology and Development at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and Director of the Global Research Consortium for School Health and Nutrition (the research arm of the newly created UN School Meals Coalition). The lecture will be followed by a reception in the Business School foyer.
• DATE CHANGE 24/5 Professor Benjamin Selwyn, Professor of International Relations and International Development at the University of Sussex: 'Environmental upgrading in global value chains: a critique with reference to the soy-beef complex'.

SPECIAL END OF YEAR EVENT: Living Histories of Sugar. Public Screening, 2:30-4:45pm, Thursday, 1 June 2023 in the Adam House Lecture Theatre.

Living Histories of Sugar was an AHRC funded performance held in October 2022 in Kingston, Greenock, and Edinburgh. It was directed by Marisa Wilson (University of Edinburgh) and co-written with Caribbean and Scottish performance artists: Marva Newton and Phillip 'Black Sage' Murray (Trinidad and Tobago); Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow and Michael 'String Bean' Nicholson (Jamaica), and Yvonne Lyon (Scotland). The performance invited audiences from across the Atlantic to be immersed in the sights and sounds of historical characters: from sugar barons and refinery owners, to enslaved and free people of colour, to sugar refinery workers and their wives. The play encouraged Caribbean and Scottish audiences to contest, re-signify, or otherwise rework the historical record, recasting the way people think about, understand and live with the transnational and unfinished nature of the sugar industry. 

Sponsored by the Research Institute of Geography and the Lived Environment (RIGLE) and the Food Researchers in Edinburgh (FRiED)

2021-2022

• 13/10 Dr Rebecca O’Connell, Reader in the Sociology of Food and Families at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, UCL Institute of Education: 'Families and Food in Hard Times: European Comparative Research'
• 10/11 Prof Ashli Stokes, Professor of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, US, and Fulbright Visiting Professor at IASH: 'Rhetorics of Resilience: Defining the Appalachian Region of the U.S. through Foodways'
• 8/12 Prof Mary Brennan, Chair in Marketing, University of Edinburgh Business School: 'Doing Better – A Good Food Nation for Scotland'
• 9/2 Dr Emma McDonell, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga: Set Up to Fail: Challenging the Origin-Based Label Panacea with Peruvian Quinoa
• 9/3 Dr Kelly Parson, Research Fellow in Food Policy and Governance at the Centre for Agriculture, Food & Environmental Management, University of Hertfordshire: Unlocking sustainable public food procurement’s transformative potential: does the policy mix hold the key?
• 13/4 Dr Sarah Goldsmith, Chancellor's Fellow and Lecturer in Urban and Material Culture History at the University of Edinburgh: Re-Embodying the Absent Historical Body: Henry Poole & Co’s Measuring Books, c.1840-1950.
• 11/5 Dr Ana Tominc, Reader Reader in Media, Communication and Performing Arts at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh: Food and cooking in early television in Europe (book launch)

2020-2021

• 7/10 Dr Lindsay Jaacks, Global Academy of Agriculture and Food Security Edinburgh: 'Beyond Beef: Developing Strategies to Reduce Red Meat Consumption in the US'
• 4/11 Dr Bethany Benker, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of the West of England: 'Stockpiling during lockdown in the UK: What actually happened?'
• 9/12 Alex Hughes,  Professor of Economic Geography at Newcastle University: 'Globalizing Responsible Food Consumption - Insights from Brazil, China and South Africa'
• 12/1 Dr Megan Blake, Senior Lecturer in Geography at the University of Sheffield: 'Surplus food redistribution as ontological alchemy'
• 3/2 Dr Gurpinder Lalli, Senior Lecturer in Education and Inclusion Studies at the University of Wolverhampton: 'Schools, space and culinary capital'
• 7/4 Dr Venetia Johannes, previously a post-doctoral research affiliate at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford: 'Nourishing the Nation: Food as National Identity in Catalonia'
• 5/5 Dr Alexander Day, Associate Professor of History at the Occidental College, Los Angeles: 'China's Capitalist Agrarian Change and the Transformation of the Tea Industry'
• 9/6 Dr Jessica Paddock, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Bristol: 'Eating on the edge: A sociological perspective for transforming small island food insecurities'