Ben Davenport 

Food has been increasingly recognised as playing an important role in the performance of identities and interest in food heritage has grown greatly as an area of scholarly and public interest over the last two decades. This PhD project will help conceive new frameworks through which to think about the role of food, as a form of cultural heritage, in society, and to think about mobility, the movement of people, foods and knowledge, in ways that acknowledge the diversity of migrant experiences.

The project takes as its focus ‘foodways’ of European migrants in the UK. Selected case studies span a range of temporal and spatial experiences to provide opportunities for comparisons between the role of food heritage in social, cultural and political life under different circumstances. Fieldwork will be carried out in Northwest England working with Ukrainian migrants, in East Anglia working with Polish migrants, and in South Wales working with Italian migrants and migrant descendants. Embracing the creativity inherent in food practices, the project will utilise approaches to data collection that acknowledge the embodied nature of our relationships with food, and seek novel ways of exploring and representing these relationships.