The Taste Remembered. On the Extraordinary Testimony of the Women from Terezín

The article presents an attempt to combine food studies (also termed the anthropology of food) with scholarly reflection regarding memory. The analysis focuses on the book entitled In Memory’s Kitchen. A Legacy from the Women of Terezin [ed. Cara de Silva 2006], containing recipes for Jewish dishes written down by women from the Teresienstadt ghetto. But some dozen recipes that have survived do not make it a cookbook, which is essentially meant to be functional. It is more of a remembrance, a testament, and also a source of knowledge of culture at a given point in time. It is also a testimonial document. Recipes collected by de Silva tell much about their authors. They define their roles as wives and mothers. In addition, the Terezin notes point to a culinary heritage, the religious principles of food preparation and the social and economical conditions that shaped the culinary preferences and the diets of women locked in the ghetto. The article demonstrates that the actions of preparing and consuming food are a constantly repeated practice, which is connected in a network of relationships with other practices. This practice it is anchored in the everyday life, embedded in the family’s biography and fused with childhood memories. Food is presented as a sign of identity, the social bond and the community of family and friends, and also as a gift that serves to uphold these ties

Experiencing multilingual identities and interculturality through learning and socialising in languages: The ecologies of two “language cafés”

This study investigates two “language cafés” (LCs), i.e., public events which provide an informal learning space for (foreign) language socialisation. Underpinned by social constructionism, an ecological approach to language research, and ethnographically-inspired methods of data collection, the study sheds light on the co-construction of the LCs as meaningful sites for languaging and language socialisation, and explores their affordances for experiencing and performing one’s multilingual identities and interculturality. Adopting a reflexive stance, the researcher participated in the LCs as a language learner drawing on her multilingual repertoire and subjectivities, thus contributing to researching multilingually praxis by demonstrating the affordances of translanguaging as methodology. Data were collected through participant-observation, audio-recording of naturally-occurring conversations in the LCs, semi-structured interviews and focus groups, participants’ written reflections, and a researcher’s reflective journal. The findings show that participants co-constructed the LCs to seek out alternative and decentred ways of dwelling in their languages by making them part of their everyday lives and leisure activities, regardless of proximity to “target language” countries. The pleasure of languaging and the value of LCs as an intellectual and social hobby often outweighed the instrumental value of these events for the development of language skills. Further, the LCs mobilised participants’ multilingual identities and their sense of multilingual social selves which prompted them to draw on their previous language socialisation experiences. Finally, the LCs offered a safe space to engage in multiperspectivity and learn about each other’s worldviews, as well as to connect with like-minded, cosmopolitan, multilingual speakers. This doctoral thesis contributes to the field of language learning beyond the classroom by focusing on how languages are lived intersubjectively, rather than merely learned or acquired. This is consistent with a poststructuralist view of language and intercultural learning as experiencing new ways of being in the world, and much more than the development of skills

Teaching Design Thinking in a Research-Intensive University at a Time of Rapid Change

In this paper we present a snapshot of the theories, intentions, practices and outcomes produced by a teaching and learning collaboration. This is located geographically and culturally at the University of Warwick, and temporally across the period 2020-2021 marked by the global pandemic. The case study illustrates how a designerly, flexible, open, collaborative approach to learning design allowed for effective adaptation to changing circumstances. This was more effective through being formulated as an ethical approach to Design Thinking, shared by teachers, students, the host department, and collaborators (including two VR companies, a physical theatre company, and a design researcher from South Africa). By developing a humanitarian, ethical, and philosophically grounded Design Thinking, and using it for founding principles, the teaching team were able to adapt and learn, making the most of what was possible. We explore this method in depth, focussing upon how a reflective appreciation of modes of knowledge, and the use of visualisations helps us to cope with the complexity of what we are doing together, before, during, and after the period of disruption

Communicative Figurations

This open access volume assesses the influence of our changing media environment. Today, there is not one single medium that is the driving force of change. With the spread of various technical communication media such as mobile phones and internet platforms, we are confronted with a media manifold of deep mediatization. But how can we investigate its transformative capability? This book answers this question by taking a non-media-centric perspective, researching the various figurations of collectivities and organizations humans are involved in. The first part of the book outlines a fundamental understanding of the changing media environment of deep mediatization and its transformative capacity. The second part focuses on collectivities and movements: communities in the city, critical social movements, maker, online gaming groups and networked groups of young people. The third part moves institutions and organizations into the foreground, discussing the transformation of journalism, religion, politics, and education, whilst the fourth and final part is dedicated to methodologies and perspectives

Theaters of Citizenship

Theaters of Citizenship investigates the Egyptian movement for free theater, arguing that it evolved from an avant-gardist movement to an undercommons of revolutionary cultural practice. Using historiography, ethnography, and performance analysis, the book tells a story of this avant-garde from 2004-2014, analyzing its staging of rights claims, generational identity politics, and post-revolution citizenship. Using Moten and Harney’s theory of the undercommons, a space-time for politicized cultural practice, the book extends avant-gardist theater theory to consider the revolutionary potential of performance within and outside theater spaces. Pahwa considers the performer’s bodily repertoire as a medium of cultural and political citizenship, drawing on Diana Taylor’s concept of repertoire, and expanding it to account for how performance mediates futurist culture and revolutionary practice

Composition, Authorship, and Ownership in Flamenco, Past and Present

In this article I explore how some processes of composition have operated in the modernization of flamenco, in the various forms in which it has flourished over the last century. Paralleling developments in certain other genres, in commercial pop flamenco collective, oral-tradition recycling of stock musical materials can be seen to give way to mass mediated, pre-composed songs, as new dimensions of finance and copyright precipitate polemics and legal actions. At the same time, however, the new importance of compositions and composing in the realm of this mass-mediated “nuevo flamenco” (new flamenco) has been counterbalanced in mainstream, neo-traditional flamenco by a certain codification of the existing repertoire, which has become less accommodating to new creations. The contradictions and complexities of these processes acquire various sorts of importance—as revealed by polemics and disputes—involving issues of aesthetics, ownership, and even ethnicity (as concerning Gypsies and non-Gypsies). Their complexity derives in part from the heterogeneity of forms of flamenco—from traditional to pop—and from the way that even traditional flamenco (in some respects like jazz) defies categorization as folk, classical, or pop

Performing home: à la Turca foodscapes in London

The research at hand investigates how home is performed through foodscapes by focusing on the Turkish speaking communities in London. It is based on the premises that food has a strong connection to not just where home is, but how it manifests itself at different scales and registers of food activities in the ‘here and now’ of so-called migrant communities. Home is therefore taken as an act of dwelling that is both constitutive of and constituted by the specificities of the site of habitation. Based on Ingold’s conceptualisation of dwelling perspective, the research argues that the migrant skills deployed around food are trained and practiced in response to the environment of habitation (1993, 2000) as opposed to being imported as innate skills from the country of origin. Explored through the acts of eating, cooking, serving, sharing, celebrating and talking about food puissantly problematises the frameworks of host & guest migrants and home & host nations. Reflecting upon the constitution of home through food therefore has a double function: it liberates migrant homes from the geographical dominance of a past country where they are from and at the same time recognises the site-specific manifestations of their skills “within the current of their involved activity, in the specific relational contexts of their practical engagement with their surroundings” (Ingold 2000, p. 186). The economic, social, cultural and affective mobilisations of the members of Turkish Speaking Community in London display the dynamism and heterogeneity that is inherent to both food and home. The variety of the ways in which the ethnically and linguistically diverse members of this vaguely framed group relate to themselves, to each other, to the city and to the larger discourses of community and nation are explored in this research through performative and multi-sited ethnographic tools. From shopping together with the participants for the dinner ingredients to formal interview settings, from cooking along to temporarily managing an eating out establishment, practicing with and within the contexts of the participants contributed to the knowledge formation for this research. Three interrelated yet distinct foodscape clusters emerged out of this research: Restaurants, British Kebab Awards and the households. The term foodscape here aims at encapsulating the multiscalar, interconnected, always in-the-making and at times inconsistent practices and discourses that emerge in each of these sites. Even though all ethnographic encounters took place in London, in a seemingly singular site, the research gained a multi-sited character due to the different power dynamics, ethnographic requirements, and different imaginaries offered by each of these clusters. These three registers, in their heterogeneity, show that home, looked especially through the lens of food, appears to be re-creative, generative, tactical, site-specific, and multifold series of dwelling acts, rather than being the geographical elsewhere of a migrant. By means of food, the migrant becomes the skillful dweller, and London becomes home

Using social learning environments to leverage traditional supervision of research students: a community of practice perspective

Includes bibliographical references.South African higher education is plagued by student articulation gap, which is often attributed to insufficient knowledge production processes and surface approaches to learning. Unfortunately, supervisor-student model of supervision, one of the direct, personal interventions to address this challenge, is plagued by multiple flaws. The traditional supervisor-student model of knowledge generation may not be adequate in externalizing research processes to students. Yet, a social learning model potentially extends the traditional model by providing a social environment where students collectively generate knowledge through peer-based interactions. Mindful of supervision dilemmas namely, this study explores technology-enhanced social learning environments as complements to traditional supervision models

Youth Transformations in Storytelling: Transmutability, Haunting, and Fen al Hikaya in Marrakech, Morocco

Fen al hikaya, the famous form of oral Moroccan public allegorical storytelling, is being “revived” by youth in Marrakech, Morocco at the same time as the general public discourse states that fen al hikaya is “disappearing” and that youth are suffering from lack of opportunity during the “youth bulge.” I argue that this youth revitalization of storytelling practice is haunted by the disappearing figures of older storytellers, but also that as youth move through the transmutable role of storyteller, they transform storytelling to fit their contemporary, internationalized, and economically precarious lives. While youth precarity, particularly in artistic spheres, is not unique to Morocco, my research provides a case study from which to examine how young people, influenced by the haunting of time-honored forms of expression, transform contemporary practices of cultural expression, “reviving” these forms but also innovating and changing conceptions of these practices. Through two and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork in Marrakech with over 40 storytellers and community members, this research examines how youth transform and innovate creative expression, one of the myriad of strategies youth employ to find belonging and meaning in their contemporary, precarious lives. I use conceptions of haunting and specters to examine how the figure of the storyteller and Marrakech’s Jemaa el Fna Square, the most famous location for storytelling performance in Morocco, haunt transformations Moroccan youth are making within their contemporary storytelling practice in Marrakech through elements such as performance configuration, language choice, and the use of costumes and props. I discuss how skills like public speaking and fluency in English through storytelling can lead Moroccan youth to different career paths both within and outside Morocco, contributing to their flexibility but also to their role as internationally influenced individuals