Dr Emma-Jayne Abbots

Dr Emma-Jayne Abbots a political and economic anthropologist. 

Her research centres on the cultural politics and practices of food practices and eating. Her research is predominantly located in rural contexts, and addresses the ways in which particular forms of food production, distribution and consumption are framed and valued through discourses of ‘heritage’, ‘tradition’ and ‘sustainability’. 

As such, she explores the networks of relatedness through which competing models of ‘good food’ are produced, transmitted and projected onto specific actors and agencies, as well as examining, in turn, the ways these actors and agencies respond to such models. Her research was previously located in the Ecuadorian Andes, although she has research interests across NW Europe and has recently initiated a project on craft cider. She has additional related interests in materialities and material culture; care, intimacies and kinship; the media; architecture, particularly domestic; the body; time politics.

Abbots is the co-editor (with A. Lavis) of Why We Eat, How We Eat: Contemporary Encounters between Foods and Bodies (Ashgate, 2013), and Careful Eating: Embodied Interactions between Food and Care (with A. Lavis and L. Attala) (Ashgate, forthcoming). She has published chapters in a range of edited collections focused on food practices and in peer-reviewed journals. 

She is also the founding member of Supermarkets Research Network (SuRN) (with B. Coles, M. K. Goodman and H. G. West); co-leader of the theoretical project ‘Consuming Materialities’ (with A. Lavis); and academic advisor for the ‘Rural Alliances’ project, for which she is undertaking research on food and heritage. Her research has received funding from both the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Royal Anthropological Society.

Following completion of her PhD in Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, she taught a range of modules at both Goldsmiths and Birkbeck, before joining University of Wales Trinity Saint David as Lecturer in Anthropology and Heritage. Abbots is also a Fellow of the Unit for Biocultural Variation and Obesity, University of Oxford.