Edda Starck & Raúl Matta (2022): More-than-human assemblages and the politics of (Food) conviviality: cooking, eating, and living together in Germany, Food, Culture & Society

Link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/15528014.2022.2160893

ABSTRACT

This article follows the activities of two initiatives seeking to improve living conditions of migrants in Germany. In their attempts to foster collective livability, both rely on ingenious assemblages of food, people, material objects, and their individual and collective affordances. Central in these assemblages are technological solutions the initiatives have devised to overcome the obstacles newcomers face: One uses food bikes that bypass social, physical, and bureaucratic hurdles, whereas the other employs a shipping container with a built-in kitchen that travels across Germany, leaving behind communities that cook together. We explore how material agencies operate and matter in the pursuance of convivial contexts that favor social inclusion, the latter seen as an ongoing socio-material accomplishment constituted as human and nonhuman actors interact in the world.