Ariana Gunderson is a graduate student at the IU Food Institute and a first year PhD student in the Anthropology Program at IU. She was recently awarded an Ostrom Fellowship to support her dissertation research and is a member of the Sustainable Food Systems Science group (SFSS).
Q: So, Ariana, what brought you to Indiana University?
A: I was drawn to IU for the very strong focus on food within the Anthropology Department and within the university as a whole. I knew right away that I wanted to get involved with the Food Institute and SFSS, and they’ve both been a really wonderful physical space, and also community, to be a part of.
Q: What were you doing before coming to IU for your PhD?
A: I come from a Food Studies background, and I got my Masters in Gastronomy from Boston University. I’ve been working these past few years on the study of public and private space, specifically in restaurants. Right before I started my doctoral work, I was studying COVID outdoor dining in San Francisco – how, for instance, restaurants have created new spaces on sidewalks and public streets in response to COVID policy and how that has changed the city. I also have been exploring ideas of dining culture and public and private space in general.
Q: What are your plans for your dissertation project?
A: This summer will be my first summer of dissertation feasibility research and I’m going to be studying the German recipe industry. I’ll be in Berlin for three months, starting mid-May, exploring food media. Specifically, I’m going to be working with recipe developers to study what the process is, in their mind and body, through which a sensory food experience gets translated into text, as a recipe, and then how that recipe gets again transformed into text and then into an economic object. Essentially my research is asking, “How are these words about food a commodity, and how do they move through space?”
I’m really excited about this project because it brings together Economic Anthropology, Linguistic Anthropology, and Food Studies.
Q: Will this be your first time in Germany, or do you have a background there?
A: I lived in Germany on a fellowship for one year, and I have spoken German more than half my life. I started learning German in high school and have continued up till now. I’m just so excited to go back!
Q: Is there anything else coming up that you’re feeling excited about right now?
A: Yes, I’m very excited to be presenting on my San Francisco project at the Michicagoan Conference this May. It’s co-hosted by University of Michigan and University of Chicago, and its focus is on Linguistic Anthropology. Then I’m also going to the big food studies conference co-hosted by the Agriculture, Food and Human Value Society and the Association for the Study of Food in Society. I’ve been very generously supported by a Food Institute travel grant for that conference and I thank the Institute so much for making it possible for me. Then I’m also going to go to the Society for Economic Anthropology Conference in Copenhagen in June. I’m really looking forward to all of them.
Q: This does seem like a very full and exciting time! What would you say you are most excited about in the next 12 months of your studies?
A: I’m really excited to explore Visual Anthropology more. I am a new analog photographer – I work with film photography. It was a pandemic project that has bloomed into being a really wonderful part of my life, and I’m exploring how to make it a part of my professional practice as well. This summer, I’m going to be working with community dark rooms in Berlin to explore new techniques and to have the experience of developing alongside other people instead of just by myself in my bathroom. Analog photography is huge in German-speaking Europe. Vienna and Berlin seem to be real centers of the practice, so I’m so excited to be there.
Q: I understand you were recently awarded an Ostrom Fellowship. Can you tell us more about that?
A: Yes, I’m absolutely thrilled. I just got the news and I’m just tickled! I think it’s going to be such a great intellectual community and another way to sort of connect with the SFSS family because the Ostrom Workshop and SFSS are so connected. I’m just really grateful for the opportunity to be in an interdisciplinary setting because so much of a doctoral program is about becoming more and more hyper-focused on one project, on one way of doing things, and so I’m really grateful for the chance to be in an interdisciplinary community to learn how to talk about my research to a lot of different people. And to learn different ways of doing things.
Q: What first led you to this area of studies?
A: So, I have always loved learning and I have tended to get very interested in something and then sort of burn out on it. My undergraduate degree was in Egyptology, which was incredible. It was something wonderful for four years of my life and then, when I graduated, I needed something new. I knew that if I was going to continue in a professional research capacity I needed to be able to sustain interest in something longer than four years at a time and I thought, “Well, I’m going to have to eat every day for the rest of my life, and so I can’t get bored of food!” And that actually has worked!
What’s interesting about food as an object or field of study is that it is endless. There’s always more to learn about it. It’s also a younger field, so there’s a lot of space for junior scholars to explore. There’s new territory to draw new connections, and it’s something that I get to think about all the time. I’m always engaging with food and food messages and food media. It’s all around us, so I get to have my scholarly researcher brain activated all the time, not just in really specific settings, and I really enjoy that.
Q: What would be your advice for a younger scholar who is just embarking on their academic career and struggling to find their focal point. What would be the guiding questions you might suggest someone ask themselves?
A: I would encourage someone to find something that they could very happily think about for 10 years. I think a sign of a good research topic, theme, or area is one where questions beget questions, where you start to wonder something that makes you wonder something else that makes you wonder something else. That shows that your brain is able to trace the connections in a way that, even though you’re thinking about one topic for a really long time, it’s actually just that you get wider and deeper into that topic. If your brain can already latch on to new connections, then I think it’s a good sign that that’s something that you would be able to find interesting for many years.
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