Dr. Elisa Ascione, Coordinator of the Food & Sustainability Studies Program (FSSP) at the Umbra Institute, was invited to speak at the annual meeting of the Swiss Anthropological Association (SAA), which was held at the Graduate Institute in Geneva on November 8th.
At the panel session “A New Terrain in Food Studies: Artisanal Food”, Dr. Ascione presented the paper “Cultivating activism through terroir: an anthropology of sustainable winemakers in Umbria, Italy,” written together with two alumni of the FSSP, Mackenzie Nelsen and Jared Belsky, and with FSSP assistant Manuel Barbato.
The annual meeting was titled “The Global as Method: Ethnographic Scale in the 21st Century”: panels ranged from the ethnography of sports to the politics of humanitarism, showing how ethnography can be a tool to understand and decode contemporary society in a variety of settings.
If you are interested in learning more about ethnographic research, and would like to carry on ethnographic projects with food producers and transformers in the city of Perugia, you can enroll in the class “The Anthropology of Food: Understanding Self and Others” offered each semester at the Umbra Institute.