One-woman blogs are difficult to maintain. I started this blog primarily to share some fun ideas about food and farming and as an outlet to work on my writing. If you are a follower and have been wondering where the heck I’ve been, I’ve found different writing outlets and different spaces to share work since April. Apologies to my WordPress!
What are these spaces? Well, one of them has been with the Penn Program for the Environmental Humanities (PPEH) – a really wonderful scholarly collective that acts as an outlet for building public awareness about environmental topics. I believe I’ve mentioned in former blogs that the concept of the “environment” is tricky, as most seemingly concrete words are. But this group does an amazing job organizing conferences, lectures, and workshops as spaces for thinking about the stakes of this term as we encounter real problems that will affect our biological futures (namely things like climate change, pollution, and water source management). I was invited to contribute two blog posts to their Fellows Blog series titled, “Agriculture, Sustainability, and the Environment: Are We Doing It Right?,” organized by PPEH Fellow Fatima Zahra. I’m all for blog sharing and sending traffic to different websites, so here are the links and some short abstracts about my write-ups:
COMPANION SPECIES CLIMATE CHANGE AND OUR FOOD ANIMAL FUTURES
In this post I focus on Haraway’s term “companion species” as I dive into some technoscientific solutions the food animal industry has been working on to reduce methane gas emissions. Microbe-management makes an appearance!
RE-FRAMING OUR CLIMATE CONVERSATIONS: TAKING A “BIRD’S EYE VIEW” OF OUR COMPLEX HUMAN FOOD SYSTEMS
This essay was a follow-up to the former, thinking more about emissions and how our larger food systems (not just food animals) affect the environment. I try to distill parts of the larger system and demonstrate that there are many different ways what we eat can affect the environment. Local food movements and the socio-cultural stakes of small/large, slow/fast food production and processing are questioned in this overview.
It is a lot of fun contributing to other sites and for colleagues interested in the same subjects. The blog as a whole is fantastic, and I highly recommend following it, as well as the Twitter and Facebook of the program! I was also invited to speak at Philly Nerd Nite about microbes and food, and gave a quick, general presentation on the topic based on one of my prior blog posts. I got a lot of questions about cheese, as expected, but overall Michael Pollan spoiled my “big reveal.” His Cooked series is just exploding on Netflix (in a really good way).
In addition to writing and talking in other public spaces, I’ve also been busy preparing conference presentations for the summer and applying for summer research funding. I’m finalizing these works, which gives me more time to reflect upon them in this blog forum. So, expect some more regular posts over the summer! I recently received the GAPSA-Provost Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Innovation, an award that helps fund work that talks across disciplines. I’m happy to say my work speaks across quite a few academic spaces, including veterinary medicine, agricultural sciences, history, anthropology, art history, and even business/economics. Some of my research/travels will make up future posts in the coming months, and I will write primarily about what it is like to do interdisciplinary research and the challenges I may (psh, will!) encounter in my ethnographic and archival work. So for those of you still in the dark about what I do and why it matters, I hope these future entries will prove to be enlightening. Stay tuned!
Nicole Welk-Joerger 