Thesis abstract:

«p»The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into relief existing inequities, showing that consequences of crisis are not distributed fairly and fall along existing social, political and economic fault lines. During my time doing COVID-19 case management and contact tracing I witnessed the distressing moments of mothers needing baby formula or people unable to order food as they did not have a computer. These experiences catalysed this project that aims to investigate peoples’ experiences of lockdown in regard to food in Sydney. Tracing food access and practices will bring to light existing spatial inequality and emergent practices of resilience that are not manifest through statistical measures of socio-economic differences. This project is an ethnography of the materiality of COVID-19 in Sydney and will be conducted by connecting with community-based food services (formal or informal, permanent or ephemeral) and community members. I will draw from embodiment traditions to observe practices, linking to people’s everyday existence, context, power relations. The ethnography will help document cultural improvisation and social connection during ‘lockdown’. I expect to find intersecting threads of health, class, gendered labour, and whiteness and multiculturalism in a settler colony state, together with analysis of the political economy of state actors and economic structures and individual/community agency. Elaborating the changes in neighbourhoods and cityscapes as they refract around food may contribute to the broader fields of equitable mitigation and preparation against climate change and other syndemic crises, as well as document a particular moment of Sydney’s history.«/p»