Overview
With a background of working in community and volunteer organisations and local food networks in particular, I came into academia with a desire to help communities overcome structural challenges and inequalities. Carrying out my PhD research into food insecurity in Bristol, helped me to broaden my interest in politics to better understand the complexities within the ways in which inequalities are experienced in everyday life.
Broad research specialisms
I am a cultural geographer with interests in the everyday experiences of wellbeing in contexts of inequality. My research broadly looks at community-based projects to improve wellbeing and my specialisms include food studies, actor-network theories and cultural geographies of affect and embodiment.
Qualifications
2013-2016 PhD Human Geography ‘A Taste of Food Insecurity: towards a capacity for eating well’ Cardiff University School of Geography and Planning
2009 MA Anthropology of Food, School of Oriental and African Studies
2007 BA (Hons) Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick
Research
Research interests
My PhD research (2013-2016) looked at food insecurity in Bristol. Arguing that research of food insecurity and access to food has so far failed to account for the way in which we related to food on sensory, emotional and embodied level, I developed ideas of taste to make sense of food poverty. This enabled me to reflect on how food inequalities are experienced in places and forms that extend far beyond spaces most commonly associated with food insecurity, but might better be understood as unequally distributed precarities that are sensed and made sense of (Miele and Evans 2012) within a myriad of everyday encounters.
I have also looked at experiences of food anxieties and eating disorders on two interdisciplinary projects which emphasise the importance of affective relationships and emotional experiences in helping people come to terms with food anxieties and eating disorders. Focussing on interactions at the table, I worked with artist Sabrina Shirazi to facilitate participants who had experienced food anxieties to redesign the table setting in order to enable them to eat well. This work was enabled by Brigstowe Institute and The Cultural Capital Exchange.
I am a member of the Social Innovation Group and the Cross Campus Social Science group (CROCUSS)
Research projects
I am currently working on two co-produced ESF projects: Living Well to Work and Smart Tenants which both fall under the Future Peninsula umbrella (2017-2019).
Living Well to Work brings together a range of voluntary and community organisations across Cornwall to deliver 12 pilot programmes which help people in target groups move back towards employment. While the headline figures for employment in Cornwall are improving, certain groups have remained excluded from the workforce including those with mental ill-health, older people, people with long term health problems such as diabetes, those with Asperger’s’ Disease or Autism. Using a ‘test and learn’ approach, these pilots help participants to develop their confidence in order to head towards work, into training and education or into volunteering.
Smart Tenants is a collaborative project involving Registered Social Landlords, community development charitable organisations and local foodbanks. The project adopts a “Test and Learn” approach and work with partners to design, test and implement a programme that will enable participants to have the confidence and skills to make best use of the opportunities that will be available through Universal Credit and to progress through to employment to maintain and increase the economic development in Cornwall.
The primary focus of the project will be to develop new training and support programmes to improve financial stability, help participants with the transition to Universal Credit and move towards sustainable employment. This project will develop a range of support and training opportunities to stabilise households and give them the confidence and skills to move towards employment and the opportunity to volunteer to support their peers in the community thus adding to the social capital of the area.
Publications
Key publications | Publications by category | Publications by year
Publications by category
Journal articles
Bayfield H, Colebrooke L, Pitt H, Pugh R, Stutter N (2019). Awesome women and bad feminists: the role of online social networks and peer support for feminist practice in academia.
cultural geographies, 147447401989032-147447401989032.
Abstract:
Awesome women and bad feminists: the role of online social networks and peer support for feminist practice in academia
in her book, ‘Bad Feminist’, Roxane Gay claims this label shamelessly, embracing the contradictory aspects of enacting feminist practice while fundamentally being ‘flawed human[s]’. This article tells a story inspired by and enacting Roxane Gay’s approach in academia, written by five cis-gendered women geographers. It is the story of a proactive, everyday feminist initiative to survive as women in an academic precariat fuelled by globalised, neoliberalised higher education. We reflect on what it means to be (bad) feminists in that context, and how we respond as academics. We share experiences of an online space used to support one another through post-doctoral life, a simple message thread, which has established an important role in our development as academics and feminists. This article, written through online collaboration, mirrors and enacts processes fundamental to our online network, demonstrating the significance and potential of safe digital spaces for peer support. Excerpts from the chat reflect critically on struggles and solutions we have co-developed. Through this, we celebrate and validate a strategy we know that we and others like us find invaluable for our wellbeing and survival. Finally, we reflect on the inherent limitations of exclusive online networks as tools for feminist resistance.
Abstract.
Colebrooke L (2017). Book Review: Eating the Ocean. cultural geographies, 25(3), 510-510.
Colebrooke L, Miele M (2017). Eating Art and the Art of Eating: Unsettling the practices of taste.
Performance Research,
22(7), 102-108.
Abstract:
Eating Art and the Art of Eating: Unsettling the practices of taste
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor. &. Francis Group. This paper draws on an experimental performance in which ideas of what food is were unsettled. FOOD|sustainable|DESIGN was a performance held in Milan in October 2015. Orchestrated and performed by honey and bunny, performance artists from Vienna, the unusual meal was attended by scientists, artists, policy makers and the public. Here food itself became art as we encountered familiar foods in unusual ways. Analysed using ideas of taste - as a performative practice which turns materials into food -- FOOD|sustainable|DESIGN can be understood as a chance to disrupt and make visible the industrialised processes that enable our every-day food practices. As an activity, tasting goes beyond the palate and the plate, involving our bodies including guts, fingers, tongues and brains. By working with and against these routine embodied practices, honey and bunny made us aware of issues around sustainability, not through only words and ideas but through tastes. Consequently, through the unsettling of the material practices in the performance, our embodied, reflexive engagement with food might be seen to offer space to speculate on how food might otherwise be.
Abstract.
Publications by year
2019
Bayfield H, Colebrooke L, Pitt H, Pugh R, Stutter N (2019). Awesome women and bad feminists: the role of online social networks and peer support for feminist practice in academia.
cultural geographies, 147447401989032-147447401989032.
Abstract:
Awesome women and bad feminists: the role of online social networks and peer support for feminist practice in academia
in her book, ‘Bad Feminist’, Roxane Gay claims this label shamelessly, embracing the contradictory aspects of enacting feminist practice while fundamentally being ‘flawed human[s]’. This article tells a story inspired by and enacting Roxane Gay’s approach in academia, written by five cis-gendered women geographers. It is the story of a proactive, everyday feminist initiative to survive as women in an academic precariat fuelled by globalised, neoliberalised higher education. We reflect on what it means to be (bad) feminists in that context, and how we respond as academics. We share experiences of an online space used to support one another through post-doctoral life, a simple message thread, which has established an important role in our development as academics and feminists. This article, written through online collaboration, mirrors and enacts processes fundamental to our online network, demonstrating the significance and potential of safe digital spaces for peer support. Excerpts from the chat reflect critically on struggles and solutions we have co-developed. Through this, we celebrate and validate a strategy we know that we and others like us find invaluable for our wellbeing and survival. Finally, we reflect on the inherent limitations of exclusive online networks as tools for feminist resistance.
Abstract.
2017
Colebrooke L (2017). Book Review: Eating the Ocean. cultural geographies, 25(3), 510-510.
Colebrooke L, Miele M (2017). Eating Art and the Art of Eating: Unsettling the practices of taste.
Performance Research,
22(7), 102-108.
Abstract:
Eating Art and the Art of Eating: Unsettling the practices of taste
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor. &. Francis Group. This paper draws on an experimental performance in which ideas of what food is were unsettled. FOOD|sustainable|DESIGN was a performance held in Milan in October 2015. Orchestrated and performed by honey and bunny, performance artists from Vienna, the unusual meal was attended by scientists, artists, policy makers and the public. Here food itself became art as we encountered familiar foods in unusual ways. Analysed using ideas of taste - as a performative practice which turns materials into food -- FOOD|sustainable|DESIGN can be understood as a chance to disrupt and make visible the industrialised processes that enable our every-day food practices. As an activity, tasting goes beyond the palate and the plate, involving our bodies including guts, fingers, tongues and brains. By working with and against these routine embodied practices, honey and bunny made us aware of issues around sustainability, not through only words and ideas but through tastes. Consequently, through the unsettling of the material practices in the performance, our embodied, reflexive engagement with food might be seen to offer space to speculate on how food might otherwise be.
Abstract.
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Teaching
I have experience teaching in geographies of consumption, geographical theory and sustainable food systems.
At Exeter I contribute to the modules of Rural Social Issues and the California Field trip.
