The production of artisan cheese in the United States (US) has exploded over the past two decades. Unlike its European counterparts, US artisan cheese emerged on the back of narratives of innovation, and not through historic legacies of pre-industrial artisan production. American Artisan cheese has been permeated by competing views towards the utility and moral qualities of microbial cultures and action. 

 

In this seminar, Prof. Heather Paxson demonstrates how practices and standards associated with industrial production not only inform the regulation of artisan food production, but also the regulation of human bodies, and relationships between human and non-human organisms. This seminar will be of interest to academics, students and members of the public concerned with entrepreneurship, labour and work in society, food systems and security, as well biological science and emerging regulatory regimes

 

Heather Paxson is a tenured professor of anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an incoming editor for the journal Cultural Anthropology. She is most known for her celebrated work, The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America (University of California Press, 2012). She was awarded the Diana Forsythe Prize by the Society for the Anthropology of Work and the Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology and Computing.

 

A follow-up workshop hosted by Professor Paxson and Professor Stefan Helmreich (MIT) will engage students in thinking about commercial and professional spaces as sites of participatory research and engagement. Participants will be invited to explore how debates in feminist STS and political ecology might shift understandings of spaces historically framed by highly masculine perspectives, literature and language. This workshop is open to graduate students. Please email james.debowski@anu.edu.au for workshop registration.