PROJECTS
The UC AFTeR Project
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(2018-2023) The UC AFTeR Project (University of California Agri-Food Tech Research Project) is an NSF-funded multidisciplinary collaboration across three UC campuses examining the Bay Area Agri-Food Tech sector. The project explores the interests, principles, rhetoric, social relationships and institutional forces that are guiding the sector as a whole. It inventories the sector and – through field work, interviews and media analysis – explores the possibilities, tensions and limits that stem from applying Silicon Valley tech-driven innovation to global challenges in food and agriculture. Questions driving the project include: How and why is the Bay Area a unique site for the development of food and agricultural technologies? What are the underlying assumptions of actors within the sector? What aspects of conventional approaches to food and agriculture are being “disrupted,” which aspects are not, and to what end? How do innovators understand and imagine the public? What are the possibilities and possible limits of public acceptance for new technologies and novel foods?
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Guthman, J. and Biltekoff, C. 2022 Agri-Food Tech’s Building Block: Narrating Protein, Agnostic of Source, in the Face of Crisis. Biosocieties
Broad G. and Biltekoff, C. 2022 Food System Innovations, Science Communication, and Deficit Model 2.0: Implications for Cellular Agriculture Environmental Communication.
Guthman, G., Butler, M., Martin S., Mather C., and Biltekof, C. 2022 In the Name of Protein. NatureFood.
Biltekoff C. and Guthman, G. 2022. Conscious, Complacent, Fearful: Agri-Food Tech’s Market-Making Public Imaginaries. Science as Culture.
Guthman, J. and Biltekoff, C., 2020 Magical Disruption? Alternative Protein and the Promise of De-Materialization. Environment and Planning E.
Broad G. and Biltekoff, C. 2022 Food System Innovations, Science Communication, and Deficit Model 2.0: Implications for Cellular Agriculture Environmental Communication.
Guthman, G., Butler, M., Martin S., Mather C., and Biltekof, C. 2022 In the Name of Protein. NatureFood.
Biltekoff C. and Guthman, G. 2022. Conscious, Complacent, Fearful: Agri-Food Tech’s Market-Making Public Imaginaries. Science as Culture.
Guthman, J. and Biltekoff, C., 2020 Magical Disruption? Alternative Protein and the Promise of De-Materialization. Environment and Planning E.
Thinking Food @ The Intersections: Justice and Critical Food Studies
Thinking Food was a year-long initiative focused on unearthing the systemic roots of food inequity through humanities-based programs: bridging cultural histories, current realities, and public imagination. Funded by the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminars, Thinking Food featured scholarly conversations and cultural programming that culminated in quarterly colloquia during the 2024-2025 academic year. Invited speakers, UC Davis faculty, and students examined how food justice extends beyond basic nourishment to encompass cultural narratives and identities. Through interdisciplinary discussions with activists, artists, chefs, and food chain workers, scholarly dialogues, and community conversations, we aimed to unearth the narratives and symbols that shape food systems and their influence on contemporary and future struggles for justice.
Activating Public Agency For the Future of Food
A collaborative role playing game
game prototype being played at Anticipation 2022
(ongoing) A collaboration with Christy Spackman, DB Bauer and Sara El Sayed (all at Arizona State University) that explores how gaming can be used to activate public agency for the future of food. Together we are designing a card-based role playing game that asks players to explore and creatively experiment with roles they might play, beyond passive consumer, in the future food system.
Unbounding Food Futures
An Experiment in Co-Conjuring
Notes from a workshop participant
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(2021-2022) "Unbounding Food Futures" was inspired by the invitation of critical future studies to broaden the possibilities for conjuring futures through public cultural processes not left to experts, and by afro-futurism’s corrective to the erasure of race in futures, as well as its emphasis on the arts. It sought to engage in collaborative conjuring of both food futures and of creative, anti-racist methods for food futuring. The centerpiece of the project was a two-day workshop, held in spring 2022, in which humanists and qualitative social scientists from five UC campuses spent two days experimenting with and reflecting on alternative methods for food futuring. A collaboration with Julie Guthman, Jade Sasser and Elizabeth Hoover supported by a grant from UCHRI Living Through Upheaval Program. |
ASFS Racial Justice Research and Pedagogy Fellowships
(2023-2025) Co-PI (with Beth Forest, Farha Terniker, Megan Elias) on a two year grant from the Mellon Foundation to support the Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS) in the organization's commitment to building both a more racially just food system and a more racially inclusive field of food studies. Offering two types of fellowships for scholars and practitioners working in the humanities and humanistic social sciences : Racial Justice Research Fellowships, and Racial Justice Pedagogy Fellowships. Learn more about the program and the projects funded through it here.