Dr Celia Plender

My work focuses on political-economic change in Britain through the lens of grassroots, community groups, engaging with themes of everyday politics, mutual aid and care. I have conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork with urban, grassroots food co-ops to explore their everyday practices and responses to the changes taking place around them ranging from neoliberal reform to austerity and covid-19. I am currently writing a monograph based on this research which is under contract with Berghahn Book’s Anthropology of Europe Series. My next research project will look comparatively at urban and rural food and housing insecurity to explore practices of collective care, coping strategies and self-valuation.

I am co-convenor of the Association of Social Anthropologists’ Anthropology of Britain Network with Jessica Fagin.

Biography:

Following completion of a language degree at the university of Manchester in 2002, I trained as a chef. I worked in catering for several years, including working in the events catering team at the Tate Art Galleries in London, and a period in a traditional Japanese restaurant in Tokyo. After returning to the UK in 2007, I transitioned into food writing and restaurant criticism with a specialism in Japanese cuisine, including several years working on the food & drink section of Time Out London Magazine.

I returned to education in 2012 to study for a part-time Masters in the Anthropology of Food at SOAS, University of London. I then went on to an ESRC-funded Masters in Anthropological Research Methods and PhD in Social Anthropology, which I completed in 2019. Since then, I have held an ESRC postdoctoral fellowship & various fixed-term lecturer contracts at Exeter, and in January 2022 I started a permanent lectureship in social anthropology at Exeter.

Research supervision:

I am interested in second supervising PhD projects relating to any of my research areas.

Currently supervising -

Giulia Nicolini: Eating seaweed in the U.K.: understanding how culture intersects with the environmental sustainability of food

Completed PhD students -

Megan Larmer: Hope against hope: diverging values and the reconfiguration of relationships in the ‘food movement’