PhD Candidate Merin Oleschuk published an article in Anthropologica that discusses the role of culinary traditions in shaping identity among female South Sudanese refugees living in Alberta. She argues that these 'foodways' allowed the women to exercise their agency in their new environment.
Merin Oleschuk is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto studying the impact of social inequalities on food consumption. Her dissertation examines values and practices around home cooking.
We have posted the citation and the abstract of the article below. The full text is available through the University of Toronto Library Portal here.
Oleschuk, Merin. 2012. "Engendering Transnational Foodways: A Case Study fo Southern Sudanese Women in Brooks, Alberta." Antropologica, 54(1):119-131.
This article explores the experiences of Southern Sudanese refugee women in Brooks, Alberta, illustrating how "foodways" (Long 2004) impact and reflect women's conceptions of themselves as gendered, multinational citizens. When women seek out and appropriate diverse culinary traditions to create belonging within multiple circumstances, they enact agency. Women do not passively accept their fractured connections to their homeland but instead actively work to rebuild relation ships within the diversity that defines their experiences in ways that garner them power, prestige and resources to improve their lives. These movements show how gender and power are en twined in the creation of transnational belonging.
Read the full article here.