PhD Student Siobhan Watters Successfully Defends Thesis

SFU School of Communication PhD student Siobhan Watters recently successfully defended her thesis titled, “Food Techniques: A Theory of Mediation”. We caught up with Siobhan to find out more about her research and her time at SFU!

Could you tell us about why you picked the SFU School of Communication?

I was drawn to the department because of its solid grounding in political economy of communication and critical theory. I had also completed both my bachelor's and master's in southern Ontario, so welcomed a change of scenery, and the scenery around SFU can't be beat!

Could you explain your research in layman's terms?

Food techniques are something everyone understands on some level—everyone needs to eat, and there are many intervening steps in how people are fed. I call these interventions a form of mediation. This is why the subject of my work is food 'techniques' and not food as such; my interest is in the cultural and technical processes that transform raw materials into 'food' as well as the broader systems that organize access to our most fundamental need. Few people eat food straight from the ground without it undergoing some sort of transformation (cooking) or without some form intervening process (such as storage, transportation, retailing). Indeed, entire communication systems have grown up around the storage, movement, and redistribution of food. However, food techniques are rarely seen as moments of mediation or acts of communication within the discipline of communication and media studies; my project seeks to rectify that oversight.

Why was this research in food systems as communication systems important to you?

Food techniques do not just concern the everyday act of preparing and consuming food, but the overarching systems that organize and communicate food to people. Particularly when looking at ancient societies, one sees how food techniques organize entire lifeways, e.g. in the form of agricultural calendars that dictated when to plow, plant, and harvest crops, which also mapped onto people's religious lives in the form of feast days and rituals that marked cycles of death and rebirth. Food techniques organize time and space, in this sense, demarcating when and where people need to be in order to produce and access food. In contemporary societies, we are still organized by food-technical systems, but are less likely to identify ourselves with them the way ancient peoples would, in large part because the scale and distributed nature of food systems today makes them opaque to individuals. We are more likely to identify with a food or restaurant brand than with the entire system of industrial agriculture that underpins it. Nevertheless, we are connected to this system that feeds us and must routinely go to points of access for food (grocery stores, restaurants). I see food systems as the equivalent of media systems that store, transmit, and process content (e.g., data, knowledge), where the content is food and the system must respond to the material specificity of that food (its biodegradable nature) in order to function.

What do you think people can learn from your research? 

What is most significant for me is to try to step out of familiar or assumed relationships to food, and understand the ways that food techniques form the conditions for human knowing and being. It is important to see food techniques, not as instrumental processes for feeding bodies, but as wholistic practices that orient and enculturate people. We learn and know the world, in part, through food techniques. They are both material and epistemological, reproducing human bodies, but also producing knowledge about one's world, culture, and self in the process. Seeing food techniques as forms of mediation also allows us to understand more clearly how power operates through food techniques, prompting questions such as, who or what controls access to food techniques and food-technical knowledge?

What more do you think can/should be done in this area of study? 

I laud the inclusion of new 'food literacy' programs in elementary school curricula in some regions of Canada. I think that is an excellent start and something that should be adapted across the country, and at various levels of education. Food techniques are so multi-dimensional in the ways they intersect with everyday life, the community, the broader economy, and political institutions. If used as a starting point, food techniques can be used to illustrate the many ways people are connected and socialized in relation to our first need. I would also like to see something like a 'food techniques field school' in action, where students engage physically and materially with a variety of food techniques, from foraging to baking, and discuss the varieties of knowledge that may flow from them (or the lack thereof where industrial machinery is involved, requiring little human intervention). At the same time, I think it is important to approach food techniques theoretically in order to comprehend new potentialities for our relationship to food and not just accept the present system as the only way of doing things. 

What is your most cherished memory as a student at SFU?

Most of my cherished memories come from being in Dr. Andrew Feenberg's seminars and being a part of his ACT Lab (applied communications and technology lab). There, I met some of my best friends, and had some of the most stimulating conversations of my academic career. The ACT Lab is gone now, and I haven't been back to see the changes at Harbour Centre, but it lives on in my heart. Besides that, grabbing pints at Malone's and pizza at Goldies after classes at Harbour Centre is a favourite memory. 

Could you talk about your relationship with the faculty in the School?

I had a long and windy road to completing the PhD, made longer by life events that ultimately took me away from SFU and back to southern Ontario. I would not have made it to the end were it not for my supervisor, Dr. Svitlana Matviyenko, who continued to support me despite a pandemic and ongoing war in Ukraine. I am forever grateful.

What is your plan now that you’re graduating? 

Stay tuned!