Wednesday, May 24, 2023
4:00-5:30 PM
SJRC Common Room Oakes 231 + Zoom Registration
Join SJRC scholars for an open discussion of works-in-progress! This is a wonderful chance to engage with one another’s ideas, and support our own internal work! At this session, we will hear from Science & Justice Visiting Scholar Lindsay Kelley and brainstorm approaches to a book project called, Baking Strange. Themes include: edible archives, everyday militarisms, recipe art, participatory methods, and digestive networks.
What exactly do we eat when we eat a biscuit? Everyday objects like biscuits contain unexpected, dense connections that illuminate material and cultural networks. Using taste and recipe formats as key methods, the multiyear research initiative Tasting History involves diverse publics in experiences of tasting and eating together. Five years into this Covid-disrupted project, Kelley has published several connected essays (refer to links below), has unfinished fieldwork, and have taken multiple approaches to the project’s three case studies: Anzac biscuits, hardtack, and frybread. As a book, Baking Strange, seeks to defamiliarize the Anzac biscuit recipe literature and its methods. Included works emerge from archival research at the Australian War Memorial and participatory taste workshops conducted by the artist in collaboration with the Kandos branch of the Country Women’s Association, Cementa, Inc, and editor and videographer David Ryan. Loaned tins and research ephemera document the ongoing multiyear research project Tasting History: Biscuits, Culture, and National Identity.
- 2023 “Invert Syrup, Feminist Snap: Anzac Biscuits and Feminist Resistance to Imperial Logics.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience.
- 2022 “Biscuit Production and Consumption as War Re-enactment.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies.
- 2022 “Everyday militarisms in the kitchen: Baking strange with Anzac biscuits.” In Food in Memory and Imagination: Place, Space and Taste, edited by Beth Forrest and Greg de St Maurice. London: Bloomsbury.
- 2021 “Hard Tack.” In Feminist, Queer, Anticolonial Propositions for Hacking the Anthropocene: Archive, edited by Jennifer Mae Hamilton, Susan Reid, Pia van Gelder and Astrida Neimanis. London: Open Humanities Press.
- In progress: “Bake Together: Kitchen power, soft power, and the battle for together” Australian Feminist Studies special issue on Creating Feminist Futures ed. Rebecca Coleman and Katrina Jungnickel
This work was produced on unceded Gadigal-Bidjigal, Ngunnawal-Ngambri, Wiradjuri, and Cabrogal land. Research was conducted in compliance with UNSW Human Research Ethics protocol HC190344, now Australian National University Human Research Ethics protocol 2022/478. A related exhibit, Aftertaste, will run from April-August 2023 at Fairfield City Museum & Gallery in NSW, Australia. A biscuit baking workshop will take place in July.
Lindsay Kelley is a Senior Lecturer in the College of Arts & Social Sciences School of Art & Design at Australian National University and a UC Santa Cruz Alum (MFA Digital Arts & New Media, Ph.D History of Consciousness).