1st EASA Award for a Postgraduate Student Paper in the Anthropology of Food
We are very happy to announce the winner of the 1st EASA Award for a Postgraduate Student Paper in the Anthropology of Food: Désirée Kumpf won with the paper "What does climate change taste like? Multispecies tasting on organic tea plantations in India".
Congratulations!
This article uses a multispecies perspective on taste to examine how people encounter ecological transformations on organic tea plantations in India. Through taste, tea growers assess how plants grow in relation to their surroundings, and they notice new dynamics, such as climatic changes. Tasting helps people to implement organic techniques, which sustain intensive plantation production. The findings illustrate how people and tea plants are entangled in precarious situations. The article contributes to recent plantation studies and to the anthropological analysis of ecological problems.
Désirée Kumpf holds a BA in Anthropology from Goldsmiths, University of London, and an MA in Cultural History and Theory from Humboldt University, Berlin. Her Ph.D thesis at the Institute of Anthropology, University of Leipzig, is a multispecies study of Indian tea plantations. Her doctoral research is funded by the Hans Boeckler Foundation.
Désirée Kumpf’s award winning paper was published open access in November 2020: Kumpf, D. 2020. Organic taste and labour on Indian tea plantations. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 28(4): 789-802.
https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12951
