PROJECTS
The UC AFTeR Project
(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
(2024-2025) An Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures. Thinking Food @ the Intersections will feature quarterly colloquiums as well as scholarly and art events throughout the year focused on three themes: Reimagining the Past through Food Justice (Fall 2024), Reclaiming Our Food Narratives as a Social Justice Practice (Winter 2025) and Imagining and Enacting Just Food Futures (Spring 2025). The seminar series will “explore how food justice discourses and actions can be more solidly grounded on a holistic understanding of food justice not merely as a struggle to attain bodily nourishment, but to see food as a fundamental component of human culture and identity."
Learn more about the project and see a full list of collaborators in this short article.
Contact me to be added to the mailing list for these events ([email protected])
Learn more about the project and see a full list of collaborators in this short article.
Contact me to be added to the mailing list for these events ([email protected])
Activating Public Agency For the Future of Food
A collaborative role playing game
(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
(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.