As a cultural sociologist invested in interpretive inquiry, I am driven by curiosities about how people stay connected over vast temporal and spatial distances through food culture. I explore these curiosities in my research through two distinct but related threads.
Migration and Sensation
The first thread investigates the intersection of migration and sensation, considering how encounters produced by human movement are perceived through the body and how, in turn, individuals iteratively construct global sensibilities. In my dissertation, Sensing Palestine in Chile: Mobility, Belonging, and Power in the Comida Árabe Foodscape, I draw on a year and a half of global-sensory ethnography, cooking and eating alongside Palestinian migrants in restaurant and home kitchens throughout the central region of Chile. My ethnographic work is supplemented by 60 interviews, discourse analysis of diasporic social media groups, and online and in-person tours of bakeries, restaurants, and grocery stores. From this research, I demonstrate that the core elements of migration—movement and belonging—are experienced as kinesthesia and digestion, two understudied sensations within the social and natural sciences. I draw on mixed methods to show how mobility is felt as (a)kinesthesia as migrants simultaneously feel mobile and interconnected within the diaspora but are stuck and unable to travel and physically return to their homeland. Furthermore, belonging is experienced as (in)digestion as migrants concurrently consume and create local culture while being fetishized and demonized by host communities. My work highlights the sensorial and affective dimensions of diasporic food practices and centers migrants’ voices in ongoing academic discourse that has largely ignored the embodied dimensions of transnationalism.
I have published four separate papers on this first thread of inquiry. My article, “Sumud and food: Remembering Palestine through cuisine in Chile” (Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle East and North African Migration Studies), shows how remembering and passing down migrant food histories in the form of collective memories produces cultural steadfastness for Palestinians and their descendants in diaspora. A second article from this research, “Migration and the Senses” ( Sociology Compass), traces the intersections of cultural and migration studies, showing how movement, encounter, and return are felt moments of the migratory trajectory. I also have a forthcoming book chapter titled “Sensing Authenticity,” which tours each of the five primary senses to show how restauranters use sensation to produce auras of authenticity around comida árabe (Arab cuisine in Chile) and their exchanges with customers (Consuming Bodies). Another forthcoming article (with Jess Schwalb) considers the recent publication of Palestinian-Chilean cookbooks and their role in creating and binding a diasporic identity (The Jerusalem Quarterly).
Digital Foodways
In the second thread of research, I approach global cultural connectivity through a series of three projects that center digital foodways in situations where physical proximity is not possible. In the first project, I consider how Americans shifted their foodways during the onset of the covid-19 pandemic and subsequent social distancing measures. In an article published with Michaela DeSoucey and Gary Fine, we argue that Americans achieved co-presence while socially distancing through online commensality, cooking and eating together over video call technology such as Zoom (Qualitative Sociology). In another paper I am working on from this project, I show how making, exchanging, and consuming food parcels—small collections of food items prepared for distribution—helped Americans re-compose their sensory orientations amidst pandemic-induced embodied dislocation (under review at Senses and Society).
In the second project, I published an article in collaboration with my former student, Ella Brockway, where we analyze the history and evolution of the food tour television genre through content analysis of two recently premiered shows (Food, Culture, and Society). We find that the programming offers viewers audiovisual access to otherwise-unattainable cultural capital and intercultural exchange while presenting implicit political discourse around migration and migrant foodways. In some ways, this discourse brings attention to the hardships of the migratory journey and migrants’ cultural contributions as tastemakers but, more often, it resorts to problematic tropes of migrant deservingness, melting pot assimilation, and rugged neoliberal individualism.
In the third project, I published a collaborative autoethnography of cooking family recipes in conjunction with Matthew Jungsuk Howard (The Journal of Electronic Publishing). Following a small but growing body scholarship on ethnographic food work, we both took notes in the form of audio recordings as we gathered recipes, prepared ingredients, cooked, and consumed empanadas and doenjang-jjigae, two dishes of major cultural significance within our experiences as second-generation migrants. We interrogate what we call illegible multiculturalisms, focusing on the mediated, technic processes of translating migrant foodways into written products to discuss how our identities are always being problematically translated by social structures.
Miscellaneous Projects
In addition to these two projects, I have worked on a number of miscellaneous papers related to the themes of migration and culture. I have co-authored a book chapter, “Families and Migration in the 21st Century,” on the practices of family as they relate to the migratory experience. For the website Ethnographic Marginalia, I wrote a short reflection, “A Place at the Table,” on the role of hospitality in fieldwork, which includes personal reflections on eating with others as a form of inquiry.