The Kitchen Research Unit (KRU) focuses on transdisciplinary scholarship and practice research expertise around food, taste, eating and cooking.
What we do
The KRU is home to all kinds of adventures and analysis on and with food. KRU draws on various traditions in sociology, geography, anthropology, art and Science and Technology Studies to analyse food practices, both at home, within communities and in professional fields, such as restaurants and industry and brings them together with practice research.
Crucially, KRU engages food as a material and political issue that is of everyday concern to academics not just as a topic, but also as a material concern. The KRU engages with local communities and aims to use food from local providers, as well as connect with local groups that promote food justice. With its initiatives, the KRU also aims to intervene in food provision on campus and beyond.
Our Research Interests
The unit is interested in a wide range of topics, practices and cultures:
- Taste, recipes, cooking methods and cookbooks
- Alternative and sustainable food systems
- Foraging practices and cultures
- Food technologies
- Practices and processes of fermentation
- Food, communities, urban spaces and regeneration
- Food traditions, indigenous knowledges and food sovereignty
- Multicultural and multifaith practices of solidarity through food
- Food and media cultures
- Food, health and wellbeing
KRU hosts visiting scholars and encourages students to get in touch with its members with an interest in writing relevant MA and PhD dissertations.
Unit Directors
Laura Cuch is a cultural geographer and visual artist engaging with sociocultural food issues, material practices, migration, as well as urban (religious) communities and identities, at the intersections of cultural geography, sociology, and media and cultural studies.
Her interests in food range from spaces of commensality, including public and community meals (such as street parties, calçotades and public Iftars), community and soup kitchens, citizen-led initiatives that promote alternative food systems, as well as (interfaith) practices of solidarity and social inclusion though food.
Previously, she has undertaken research exploring the relations between food, spirituality and everyday practices of faith communities in West London. This involved the participatory arts project, Spiritual Flavours.
Read Laura’s full profile.
Michael Guggenheim is a sociologist and STS researcher focusing on the work of experts and their relationship to lay people in various fields such as disaster management, architecture and environmental research.
He has pioneered the use of performative experiments to engage lay people in sociological concerns. His interest in food comes from a parallel lay career as a cook and various attempts to bring his sociology to amateur cooks.
He has created a large number of events to collaborate in sociological cooking. For example, he has run a sociological cooking class at Akademie Schloss Solitude, he has created new forms of food emergency provision at Delphina Foundation, and most recently has created an exhibition called “Taste! Experiments for the Senses” at the Museum of Natural History, Berlin.
Read Michael’s full profile.
Goldsmiths Members
External members
- Viktor Bedö, Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures in Basel
- Marina Monsonís, The Kitchen at MACBA (Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona).
Collaborators
KRU collaborates with the Goldsmiths Allotment, and the Art Garden and Laboratory, a research centre that grows and analyses food.
