Food and Faith: Material Practices in a Multicultural Suburb of West London

This fellowship consolidates and advances the contributions of my PhD on food and religious diversity in Ealing, West London, involving participatory and biographical creative outputs. These demonstrate that food practices, recipes and cookbooks are key for religious communities, identities and education, where food operates as a rhythmic and affective marker of religious practices, and connects people, places and temporalities.

This project builds on this study and further develops its findings and impact, through writing three academic articles and a book proposal, which support my research trajectory and vision, and contribute to relevant social debates, concerning: food, diversity and urban conviviality; embodied faith practices in everyday settings, and; visual practice-led research.

Global migration and the increase of highly diverse urban settings has fuelled social research on multicultural relations and cohabitation, with much literature questioning the power relations of postcolonial ethnic food consumption. This research contributes to this debate by exploring religious spaces and celebrations as key sites for personal and embodied practices of multicultural food exchange beyond commercial settings, which foster positive conviviality.

It uniquely involves seven faith communities and contributes to emerging research on how these create and adapt spaces through creative practices (Gilbert et al. 2019) - in this case, involving food.

Relatedly, the post-secular turn in social sciences has brought attention to the sacred in everyday settings, where scholars have argued for the blurring of boundaries between the secular and the spiritual/numinous (or non-secular) within urban environments, bodies, practices, institutions and communities. This project contributes to this issue by engaging with both political and emotional/affective dimensions of food and faith.

It explores the sensuous, embodied and affective capacities of religious food preparations and sharing; and evidences their entanglement with hierarchical and gendered norms, at the intersection of national identity and migration histories. Here, it reveals nuanced and intimate experiences of this relationship across domestic and worship spaces and, in so doing, exposes how food practices traverse thresholds, such as between self/other, public/private, sacred/non-sacred.

Further, there is burgeoning interest in practice-led research in the social sciences, which calls for better understanding the affordances of creative and participatory research. Here, the project makes novel theoretical, methodological and empirical contributions by drawing on new materialism and engaging in practice with Karen Barad's call for an appreciation of how ethics, knowing, and being are intertwined.

It also expands understandings of the material performativity of creative practices for accessing and producing sensorial, embodied, aesthetic and affective experiences, as well as for developing creative and collaborative relationships between participants, academics and publics.

The Fellowship adopts different strategies to maximise impact and dissemination to both academic and wider audiences through publications, conferences, seminars, workshops and an exhibition. It holds the potential to influence policy by engaging with issues of urban governance and conviviality, through research funding proposals in collaboration with Professor Griera and members of ISOR.

These address the need for better understanding the significance of outdoor and large-scale commensality (eating at the same table) for how communities create spaces, engage with other local communities, faiths, cultures and governing bodies, and develop a sense of belonging. This focuses on meals in ordinary public and community urban settings, which are not designed for this purpose, where food is often strategically used to introduce cultural and religious difference in 'acceptable' ways (Clot-Garrell et al., 2022).