IMPORTANT INFORMATION: This talk will be presented online using Zoom. Registration is required before 3:00 pm on Tuesday, 14 April 2026. Log in information for Zoom will be emailed to those who have registered with their registration confirmation. The session will be recorded and posted to WAPA's YouTube channel within a few days of the event.
Title: Digital Gastro-solidarity: Digital Food, Community, and Resistance
Abstract: Ongoing embracing and integration of digital technologies in everyday life and practices have increasingly translated and transformed mundane activities into the online. Permutations of the “onlife” have shaped how people perceive, engage, and interact with digital technologies and infrastructures in relation to their bodies, identities, and senses of self. The digital turn of food has brought the inherent politics of food and their entanglements online; placing, positioning, and expanding discourse on the global food system and how it is articulated. Digital food activism (Schneider et al. 2018) embodies how user-generated media, social media infrastructures, and social movements collide to extend activism around the food system. This talk proposes and examines another iteration of digital food activism, digital gastro-solidarity. Digital gastro-solidary emerges from the intermeshing and entangling of gastropolitics (Low 2020), semiotic codes of food (Appadurai 1981), and food symbolic politics (DeSoucey 2016). Through examination and analysis of digital food media, I present several case studies of digital gastro-solidarity, defined as the internet-based collective efforts to demonstrate sociopolitical solidarity for ideas, beliefs, and movements through the construction, tinkering, and sharing of ideas around the ‘national foods’ (Ichigo et al. 2019) of a country and the identities of the cultural groups they may be associated with. These case study analyses do not claim nor lead discussions on the highlighted national foodways or cuisine, but rather, provide insights on the mosaic of ways that people co-create, share, and perform acts of solidarity online through seemingly mundane activities like food, cooking, and eating within an age of surveillance and censure.
Speakers: Ashley Thuthao Keng Dam
Ashley Thuthao Keng Dam is a medical and visual anthropologist, ethnobotanist, and food writer. Thao's research is in (digital) food studies, nutritional anthropology, feminist STS, global health, and environmental humanities. Thao is Visiting Scholar in the Department of Anthropology, Portland State University, and Science Communicator under the moniker "Thao Eat World". Thao co-founded the plant humanities initiative "Plant Planet Plate" which combines science and storytelling to celebrate and conserve traditional ecological knowledge and biocultural diversity in Cambodia, The Netherlands, and beyond. Thao was previously a Lecturer at Maastricht University in The Netherlands and an Explorer for the National Geographic Society.
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