The microstructure of amorphous polymers-- a wide angle x-ray diffraction study

Imperial Users onl

A taste of food insecurity: towards a capacity for eating well

This thesis considers food insecurity in Bristol through an analysis of taste. Using a bricolage of ethnographic methods designed to bring the sensory elements of food practices to the fore, I worked with three projects in the city to examine the socio-materialities of food insecurity as they are felt within people’s daily lives. Working with an Emergency Food Aid (EFA) charity, a community bus scheme and a cookery course for socially isolated people, I contribute to geographical understandings of food insecurity by looking in places and attuning to senses, feelings and affects that are otherwise invisible. Inspired by material-semiotics – where nonhumans matter – and including ideas of affect, I move away from a static definition of food insecurity as ‘access to a good diet’ and instead develop ideas of taste, which I define as capacity for eating well. I use capacity to ground a critical analysis of inequality within the social and material relations of embodied life. I use eating well to bring the more-than-human collectivities into the frame, accounting for the care-full socio-materialities at play in food encounters. Importantly, I move beyond an ontology of individual rational agents and a focus on empowered choice as a solution to insecurity. The empirical material shows that practices of good taste are contingent and fragile, shaped by the material-affective conditions of food encounters; that interdependencies rather than individual empowerment enable us to eat well; and that precarious living conditions produce affects that can be decisive factors in whether we eat well or go hungry. Ultimately, this taste-full approach places a critical analysis of food insecurity within the messy entanglements of food practices and opens up new spaces for understanding and tackling the issue

Eating art and the art of eating: unsettling the practices of taste

This paper draws on an experimental performance in which ideas of what food is were unsettled. FOOD|sustainable|DESIGN was a performance held in Milan in October 2015. Orchestrated and performed by honey and bunny, performance artists from Vienna, the unusual meal was attended by scientists, artists, policy makers and the public. Here food itself became art as we encountered familiar foods in unusual ways. Analysed using ideas of taste - as a performative practice which turns materials into food -- FOOD|sustainable|DESIGN can be understood as a chance to disrupt and make visible the industrialised processes that enable our every-day food practices. As an activity, tasting goes beyond the palate and the plate, involving our bodies including guts, fingers, tongues and brains. By working with and against these routine embodied practices, honey and bunny made us aware of issues around sustainability, not through only words and ideas but through tastes. Consequently, through the unsettling of the material practices in the performance, our embodied, reflexive engagement with food might be seen to offer space to speculate on how food might otherwise be

‘We’re on the edge’: Cultures of care and Universal Credit

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Routledge via the DOI in this recordAusterity and welfare reforms – such as Universal Credit (UC) – are changing the ways in which care is delivered in the UK, increasing the precarity of individuals and the organisations who care for them. New cultures of care are emerging as a result. We show how an emplaced affect of ‘edgy-ness’ shaped a culture of care within third-sector organisations and housing associations working in Cornwall, UK. Drawing on a collaborative project consisting of four housing associations and four VCSOs, we explore ‘edgy-ness’ as one specific affect of precarity through an analysis of practitioners’ narratives of the project and its success.European Social Fund (ESF

Digital possibilities and social mission in the voluntary sector: the case of a community transport organisation in the UK

This is the author accepted manuscriptDigital technology is seen as a panacea to meeting the financial and operational challenges faced by voluntary and community sector organisations (VCSOs), through delivering efficiencies and cost-saving, alongside improving quality of service. However, according to recent assessments in the UK, the rate of digital adoption is slow compared with other sectors. This article identifies how a VCSO in a period of austerity prioritises its social mission over functionality and efficiency gains from digital technology. Employing the heuristic of phronesis, we argue that VCSOs seeking to implement digital innovations need to strike a balance between instrumental rationality (that is, what is possible to achieve with technology) and value rationality (that is, what is desirable to pursue by VCSOs). Our key argument is that theories of value rationality provide a new explanation for the slow adoption of digital technology among VCSOs.Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC