Humanities Representative, Living Sustainably Catalyst
Themes: Thriving communities, Reducing health inequalities, Greener futures, Sustainability and creativity
Expertise: ‘Leftover’ meanings in food; global production and consumption of food; eating disorders (notably the discourses around OSFED, the most prevalent yet least known eating disorder)
I am passionate about revealing the unthought-of constructs of power; effects of trauma and exploitation; and critical potential bound up with representations of food, drink and their production and consumption. My work is at thenexus of literary and cultural criticism and comparative, food studies and the medical humanities, examining discourses and literary, philosophical and visual texts.
My latest book is Leftovers: Eating, Drinking and Rethinking with Case Studies from Post-war French Fiction and I am currently working on the politics of not knowing and of representation of eating disorders, and supervising PhD projects on interrogating representation of meat substitutes and diasporic Desi foodways.
I also publish on documentary aesthetics and postcolonial global food chains; intertextual geopolitics and gastrodiplomacy; understanding of alterity revealed by comparing structuralist and poststructuralist thought involving food; relationships between globalisation, cultural capital and symbolic violence; and questions of recycling and cultural production.
I am a founder member of The Food Group at RHUL, co-organising events raising awareness of the intersection of sustainability and culture, Inedible, Unpalatable and Indigestible and Food and Drink on the Brink.