You can watch Rosie and Deborah here:

Seminar 2

When: Wednesday, 16 March 2016 from 16:00 to 18:00

Where: City University London, Northampton Square London EC1V 0HB GB. Room C314 of the Tait Building.

Speakers:

Rosie Boycott

Title: “Women’s Lib, Cooking and Capitalism”

This presentation will raise a number of questions regarding the complex relationship between feminist ideas and cooking under capitalism. Focusing on the British context, it will depart from the founding of Spare Rib in the early 1970s to trace how food companies – in a way – colluded with the early Women’s Liberation Movement to promote meals that did not need cooking, and then how this has gone out of control. The presentation will attempt to reconcile feminist beliefs about women not being dumped with doing all the cooking, and the very real need not to feed ourselves and others on processed meals. We now say ‘we have no time’, but how we spend our time is a choice, and we have chosen not to spend it cooking.

About the speaker: Rosie Boycott co-founded the feminist magazine Spare Rib, along with the publishing company Virago Press. She was the editor of men’s magazine Esquire, and the first woman editor of national broadsheet and national mass-market newspapers (Independent, Independent on Sunday,Daily Express). She is also an author, broadcaster, filmmaker, and Chair of London Food Board.

Deborah Johnston

Title: “The Production of Malnutrition: a Critical Review of Gender and Differentiation in Agri-Nutrition Policy”

Deborah Johnston (SOAS) will present a paper co-authored with Jasmine Gideon (Birkbeck, University of London). This paper reviews the new wave of agri-nutrition policy documents that have appeared since the food price crisis of 2007/8. The authors find that many policy documents either fail to mention gendered or class-based differences – or consider them in a limited way. In the case of gender, many studies take a narrow approach, failing to draw out the range of restrictions facing women as farmers and consumers of food. The paper concludes that too often policy ignores the multiple ways in which people acquire food in complex food systems.

About the speaker: Deborah Johnston is a Reader in Development Economics at SOAS, University of London. She works on labour, gender, poverty and health in Sub-Saharan Africa broadly. She is the author and co-author of a number of articles in this area including: (2015) Agriculture, Gendered Time Use, and Nutritional Outcomes: A Systematic Review. International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI); and (2013) Agriculture for improved nutrition: the current research landscape.

The paper’s co-author, Jasmine Gideon, is a Senior Lecturer in Development Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. She is the author of Gender, Globalization and Health in a Latin American Context (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and the co-editor of Migration, Health and Inequality (Zed Press, 2013). Her current research explores health and well-being among the Latin American community in the UK.

You can find the video, photos and Mary’s presentation from the Ecofeminism, Food and Social Justice Seminar 1 here

Speakers:

Sheila Dillon

Title: “Food and Agriculture in the media: Notes from a feminist journalist”

Sheila has been a food journalist for almost three decades, beginning work as an editor and writer at the New York based magazine, Food Monitor. For 20 years she has worked on The Food Programme, first as reporter, then producer and now presenter. Her investigative work has won many awards including the Glaxo Science Prize, Caroline Walker award and several Glenfiddich Awards, most recently for her documentary on the history of the American meat industry. In the late 1980s and 90s she and Derek Cooper covered the breaking scandal of BSE, the rise of GM foods, the growth of the organic movement from muck and magic to multi-million pound business, the birth of the World Trade Organisation and irradiation at a time when those subjects were not even a gleam in a newshound´s eye. Recent programmes on the chocolate industry, fishing practices and food prices carry on the tradition. She is also the creator of Radio 4’s first interactive grocery show, Veg Talk. In January 2008 she was awarded an honorary doctorate by City University for her work, which, the citation says, “has changed the way in which we think about food.”

Mary Mellor

Title: “An Ecofeminist Economics for Sustainability and Social Justice”

This presentation will argue that ecofeminism can provide a framework for sustainable provisioning based on sufficiency (enough) and social justice (an equal right to livelihood). Ecofeminism provides a critique of neoliberal economics because it exposes the linked oppression and marginalisation of ‘women’s work’ (work around the body and sustenance) and the exploitation and degradation of the natural environment. The boundary that excludes both is economic value expressed through the allocation of money: paid versus unpaid or low paid work and nature as a ‘free’ resource. Rather than arguing for the abandonment of money systems the case will be made that money needs to be democratised and re-oriented to public and social benefit.

About the speaker: Mary Mellor is Professor Emeritus at the University of Northumbria, Newcastle upon Tyne. Her early research and activism in the co-operative movement resulted in a co-authored book Worker Co-operatives in Theory and Practice (1988). Later active involvement and research in ecofeminism led to two books Breaking the Boundaries: Towards a Feminist Green Socialism (1992) and Feminism and Ecology (1997). She took part in the anti-nuclear women’s peace camp at Greenham Common and toured Japan talking on Women, Environment and Peace. She also helped set up her University’s Sustainable Cities Research Institute. Concern at the failure of modern economies to recognise unpaid domestic labour and environmental damage resulted in three books: The Politics of Money (co-authored 2002), The Future of Money (2010) and Debt or Democracy (2016).

On May 15 2014, we officially launched GSRF.  We were incredibly lucky to do so with a public lecture by the brilliant feminist sociologist Bev Skeggs. The lecture was followed by discussion and a wine reception.

Figures of fun, subjects of judgment in the making of proper persons

Since Francis Bacon’s sixteenth century ‘theory of monstrosity’ those with power have developed numerous symbolic methods to classify and judge the value of the powerless in order to force them to labour. For women judgment was usually based on their sexuality in relation to national propriety, purity and progress. The excessively sexual woman has both threatened and fascinated for centuries. This paper will explore how caricatures of female sexuality have developed over time ending with analysis from a recent research project on reality television, Reacting to Reality TV: Audience, Performance, Value, 2012. This research explores modern morality plays, where cartoon versions of this long history of judgment are spectacularly performed on our screens.

Beverley Skeggs is an ESRC Professorial Fellow in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has also worked in the areas of Women’s Studies and Cultural Studies. Her main publications include The Media (1992), Feminist Cultural Theory (1995), Formations of Class and Gender (1997), Transformations: Thinking Through Feminism (2000), Class, Self, Culture (2004), Sexuality and the Politics of Violence and Safety (2004, with Les Moran, Paul Tyrer and Karen Corteen), Feminism After Bourdieu (2004, with Lisa Adkins), and Reality TV and Class (2011) and Reacting to Reality Television: Audience, Performance and Value (2012) (both with Helen Wood). She is the co-editor of The Sociological Review.