Kitchen cultures: Multispecies co-creation with invisible cultures in the kitchen

Modi, Kaajal

Abstract

This thesis outlines the development of a practice framework for multispecies co-creation in the kitchen. This framework is presented as a tool for public engagement that can be used by co-designers and researchers to engage women from the Global Majority as a way to collaboratively explore how nature and culture interrelate through domestic practice. I argue that engaging in co-creation through food and fermentation with migrant women can be a way to explore the more-than-human relationships my collaborators negotiate in the kitchen as tacit, performative and embodied knowledges on multispecies entanglement. This is a form of co-creation that engages with both the human and ecological as co-constitutive of microbial and geographical ecologies, as a practice of sympoiesis, or becoming-with others. I further argue that these practices figure their own multispecies cosmopolitics that are alive and responsive to their conditions, and that have been adapted to context through migration. This is a feminist ontology that I have called aunty knowledge. Aunty knowledge is tacit, in that it lives in the act of fermenting, cooking and eating, performative, in that it emerges through practice, and it is embodied, in that it can be registered and shared through the senses. Understanding these practices as relational of nature-cultures can attune us as designers to the politically-activated dimensions of the legacies of food cultures as we work in these more-than-cultural spaces.
As a result of COVID-19, the work further draws inspiration from diaspora media practices as ways to facilitate communication and intimacy over distance. Reflecting on conversations and investigations I engaged in with other artists, designers and researchers working with microbes, as well as eight women from the Global Majority in the UK, I develop a series of artistic multimedia outcomes. The multimedia outcomes are intended to invite public encounters with aunty knowledge through their own tacit, performative and embodied modes. I use these to reflect on multispecies co-creation, and the conceptual affordances it offers us, in terms of its potential to underpin more situated, nuanced and plural ways of co-designing with women and femmes from the Global Majority. By situating myself as a facilitator of these interactions, I argue for an explicit political positionality by designers who choose to work in the areas of social good or social innovation, or through multispecies making and food- or eco- practices. The framework is further situated through a series of recommendations for co-designers who are working in this space, that encourages critical reflection on our complicities within and responsibilities to the others (human and otherwise) with whom we might design using experimental and experiential modes.

Citation

Modi, K. Kitchen cultures: Multispecies co-creation with invisible cultures in the kitchen. (Thesis). University of the West of England. Retrieved from https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/11062853

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Aug 29, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 21, 2024
• Keywords: multispecies, food, fermentation, women, kitchen, global majority
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/11062853
• Award Date: Feb 21, 2024