H.3.1 Art Meets Food in the Classroom: Alternative Approaches to Teaching and Learning in Higher Education

• Jennifer Sumner, OISE/University of Toronto

The intersection of art and food studies can occur in many places, but one especially creative venue is the higher education classroom. While much of higher education is text-based, this presentation will go beyond this emphasis by documenting the use of art in a graduate-level classroom over a twelve-year period. It will focus on two arts-based exercises in a course called The Pedagogy of Food: conceptual art to introduce students to the course subject matter and posters to share the topic of their final papers.

The first arts-based exercise is conducted at the beginning of each semester. It involves students representing through images on paper the concepts involved in answering a probing curricular question, such as: What is the relationship between food and learning? The second arts-based exercise involves students making posters about their final paper at the end of the course in order to share with their peers what they have learned about their chosen topic.

These arts-based exercises move beyond the written word and help to operationalize the imagination and act as a shuttle between the unconscious/conscious and the rational/cognitive and the extra-rational/affective dimensions (Brigham 2011). By doing so, they open up alternative ways of teaching and learning in higher education.

This alterity conforms to Clover, Sanford and Butterwick’s (2014) contention that aesthetic practices can “promote human and cultural development, address complex issues such as racism, respect aboriginal knowledge, or simply aim to provide spaces and opportunities to creatively and critically re-imagine the world as a better, fairer and more healthy and sustainable place.” Whichever the case, such exercises contribute to a deeper understanding of food studies, an enhanced awareness of visual learners and an increased appreciation of the importance of art in pedagogical environments.

keywords: pedagogy, art, food

H.3.2 HERE'S TO THEE: artistic experiments among the hybrid human-microbial socials worlds of Devonshire farmhouse cider-making

Simon Pope, University of Toronto & University of Exeter

HERE'S TO THEE is an ongoing research-creation project (2018 – ) in which participatory art practice leads a series of multidisciplinary experiments with the human-microbial social worlds of cider-making in Devon, in the south west of England. This project aims to generate new and novel constituencies, communities (and markets) for farmhouse cider, once a cornerstone of local working-people's culture and foodways, and now under threat of extinction from mass-market, industrialized and standardized rivals (as outlined in Saladino (2022)). This presentation describes the collective and collaborative artistic work which took the regional folk practice of wassailing—wishing “good health” to apple trees—as its starting point. Wassailing becomes a means of acknowledging existing, and generate new, hybrid social worlds – the results of human negotiations with the yeasts, bacteria, and moulds during the production and consumption of “natural ferment” cider.

As artistic work, this project faces the challenge of all participatory modes of contemporary art—born from art's “social turn”—to acknowledge more than human participation in our social worlds. In addressing this, HERE'S TO THEE aligns with discourses of the more-than-human in general (Whatmore, 2002), multispecies studies and human-microbial interactions (Lorimer, 2016) and with how these themes are extended in anthropologies of cheese-making: in the concept of microbiopolitics (Paxson, 2008), and the orthodoxies and local interpretations of the 'terroir idea'(West, 2022).

HERE'S TO THEE has invited collaboration from across disciplines to bring together folk singers, dialect speakers, local residents, cider-makers, farmers, multi-species ethnographers, cider historians, vitalist philosophers, anthropologists, microbial ecologists, photographers, film-makers, ceramic artists, gastronomes, and a host of microbial species and strains. The results have been new songs, participatory performances, textworks, experimental food events, ceramics, photographs, documentary film, seminars, museum displays, jointly-authored articles, and genomic data. Aspects of these outputs will feature in this presentation."

keywords: research-creation, participatory art, wassailing, human-microbial social worlds, food studies

H.3.3 Researching Performances: What Insights Can 20^th-Century Performance Artworks Offer Contemporary Food Studies Artist-Researchers?

• Robin Alex McDonald, MacEwan University

“An art of the concrete, food, like performance, is alive, fugitive and sensory,” wrote Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett in 1999. Since then, numerous other scholars and artists have begun to explore the generative areas of overlap between food studies and performance studies (Anderson et al. 2016; Banes & Lepecki 2007; Gough 1999), as well as the relationships between food, performance, and research-creation (Paxon 2013; Szanto 2018).

In this paper, I look back at twentieth-century works of performance art created before the formal advent of the field of food studies or the discourse of research creation. I ask what it would mean to understand these performances in which food and eating play an integral role, not as works of theatre or art, but as participative research practices that constitute forms of resistance to unjust “individualist, careerist, and bibliometric university cultures” (Loveless, 2009). For example, how might a performance like Janine Antoni’s Gnaw (1992), in which the artist chews voraciously at one block of chocolate and another of fat, parody ableist notions of academic rigour? How might Pope L.’s series of performances, aptly titled Eating the Wall Street Journal, offer a decolonial, anti-capitalist model of oppositional reading? How does Barbara Smith’s Feed Me (1973) complicate neoliberal processes of research ethics reviews? And how do Coco Fusco and Nao Bustamante conduct community-based research through their subversive performance STUFF (1996)?

In the final section of my paper, I contemplate the potential insights, instructions, and cautionary tales that these performances may offer present-day artist-researchers and food studies scholars interested in food justice and crip, queer, feminist, fat, anti-colonial and anti-racist critiques of the normate body.

keywords: eating, food, performance art, performance studies, research creation