Relational Approaches to Food Research: Questions, Processes, Methods

As food studies increasingly embrace values of pluriversality, justice, and transformation, a gap remains in reflecting on the tensions that develop between neoliberal academic modes and times of knowledge production and the necessary attention to ethical integrity, epistemic diversity, and relational approaches. This chapter seeks to address that gap by navigating this contradiction and presenting a methodological framework for studying food as situated, relational, spatial, and more-than-human practices. We consider food, here, not only as a research topic but also as a methodological and epistemological lens for understanding relationships among humans, more-than-humans, and environments. After offering some key concepts and definitions in food studies, the chapter presents a set of embodied and relational research practices with the aim of exploring and outlining the epistemic opportunities inherent in them. Food is ultimately addressed in the chapter as a methodological entry point for analysing socioecological transformations, forms of social resistance and agency, experiences of being-in-common, practices of meaning-making and ways of re-imagining and reclaiming space and place. Finally, the chapter reflects on responsibility and accountability in relational research, and on how to make research processes and outcomes meaningful for and respectful of the priorities, times, and necessities of participants in them.