Bite back!
Exploring Food, Activism and Care
This event was held on Tuesday May 27th, 2025 with ten international contributors from varying professional and personal backgrounds. See the event’s programme below.
Programme
1:00-1:20pm. Welcome!
1:20-2:20pm. Session 1: Food & Cultural Practice
1) Farhana Naaz: Food As a Locus of Casteism: Exploring Dalit Resistance through Food, Care and Culture
2) Isabella So: Kitchen Stories: Cultural Resilience Through Cherished Kitchenware
3) Tuhel Ahmed: Food Journeys from Northeast India: Recipes of Care, Food and Cultural Resistance
2:30-3:30pm. Session 2: Personal Journeys & Creative Interventions
1) Paula Dischinger: Abendessen
2) Hannah Skinner: A Slice of Life
3) Tejas Rawal: Going to Ground
4) Marla Brennan: Nosh Box - Cooking, Eating and Washing on Wheels
3:40-4:40pm. Session 3: Hunger & Food as Political Weapons
1) Kamalpreet Kaur: Keeping the Prisoner Alive: Hunger-Striking Revolutionaries & Colonial Conceptions of Medical Care
2) Andrew J. Boyer: Sugar & Soil: Food Sovereignty in Cold War Cuba
3) Pragya Dev: Caring through Fasting & Feasting: Regional Perspectives from Select States of India
4:40-5:00pm. Closing comments
Who we are
Alisha, Réka, and Elise are three women straddling the realms of academia, activism, and community organising. As members of The Care Lab, we each utilise concepts of care ethics (Federici 2012; Gilligan 1982, 2014; Hamington 2015, 2021; Held 1993, 2006; Noddings 1984; Sevenhuijsen 1998; Tronto 1993, 2013) and care aesthetics (Thompson 2022) to think about social movements, community organising, and socially-engaged arts. We are all currently based at the University of Manchester, though we come from other countries, and share a strong interest in disrupting UK-centric (and Western-focused) scholarship on topics of care and food justice.