JOUR FIXE with Michael Guggenheim
Cooking Worlds, Eating Research
If we are what we eat and if what we eat is thoroughly shaped by industry, legislation, tradition, everyday cooking practice and kitchen technologies, how can we analyse and incubate these processes? Can we find methods that would allow us not to jump immediately to a discourse analysis of laws and the food industry or the history of recipes, but take food seriously, as a form that is problematic precisely because it enters our bodies? And what would the right level of intervention be for a research programme that is interested in the whole chain of translation, from law and regulation through human bodies into the sewage system? In my talk I will present three small experiments with which I attempted to develop a research repertoire to research food with food. The first experiment was a cooked comment to a conference on emotions and food. The second experiment was a picnic derived from research tactics, and the third experiment was an attempt to cook gentrification.
Michael Guggenheim is a Senior Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer at the Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University
of London. His research interests are in studying experts and expertise in various fields, including architecture, disasters,
and environment. He is currently researching disaster training and expertise in a project entitled “Organising Disaster.
Civil Protection and the Population” funded by the ERC. Together with Bernd Kräftner and Judith Kröll (Shared Inc.), he
works on a project funded by the Art(s) Sciences Call of the Viennese Science & Technology Fund (WWTF) to invent new forms
of emergency provision. He has also worked as a cook and has been using cooking and eating as a medium for sociology in various
projects to expand research methods at the intersection of sociology and art. Recent publications: “The Proof Is In the
Pudding. On ‘Truth to Materials’ in STS, Followed by an Attempt to Improve It.” Science Technology and Industry Studies
7 (1): 65–86, 2011 and: “Laboratizing and Delaboratizing the World: Changing Sociological Concepts for Places of Knowledge
Production.” History of the Human Sciences 25 (1): 99–108, 2012.
See please: www.migug.net