Dr Suzanne Hocknell

Personal details

Telephone:

Twitter: @suzehocknell

Email:

sh422@exeter.ac.uk

2012-2015:

University of Exeter

Learning to Teach in Higher Education (LTHE) Levels 1, 2 & 3.

2010-2012:

University of Exeter

MRes Critical Human Geographies

1998-2000:

University of Bradford

BA (Hons) Combined Studies:  Social Politics

Professional/research experience

January 27 2017:

Researcher Led Initiative, University of Exeter.

£1,000 awarded to convene (with Dr Louise MacAllister and Sostenga) a practical skills workshop for ECR's and PGR's engaged in participatory and community-based research.

September 1 2016:

RGS-IBG Annual Conference 2016. Imperial College London.

Paper presentation: Troubling the Mundane: Planned discussion groups & the fragmenting of coherent food narratives.

Session: Doing Food Research: method, transdisciplinarity and reflexivity.

Session sponsored by FGWG RGS-IBG.

 

September 1 2016:

RGS-IBG Annual Conference 2016, Imperial College London.

Convenor & Facilitator: Eater-Eaten Material Formations In, Against & Beyond Consumer Relations

Paper session sponsored by the FGWG RGS-IBG.

 

August 31 2016:

RGS-IBG Annual Conference 2016. Imperial College London.

Paper presentation: ‘Consuming the Farm’: West Town Farm as a community food hub. (with Dr Rebecca Sandover, Kevin Cotter & Andy Bragg)

Session: Organising Food Access: Community food, governance and place.

Sponsored by the FGWG RGS-IBG.

 

August 30 2016:

Food Geographies Symposium. Royal Geographical Society, London.

PechaKucha presentation: The Fat of the Land?  Eating well with the stuff of margarine.

 

July 19 2016:

£3,000, ESRC IAA Impact Cultivation Award, University of Exeter.

Understanding the Exeter Food Network in Practice

(Prof. Stewart Barr, Dr Rebecca Sandover & Suzanne Hocknell).

Awarded to continue our work with West Town Farm (and associated projects).  We will use collaborative and social learning methods to co-develop understandings of the range of organisational goals, competencies and aspirations for the Exeter Food Network, and enable the Network to develop a series of skills and research competencies for developing its work in collaboration with publics and business consumers in Exeter as it works towards a Sustainable Food City award.

 

June 28 2016:

Seminar: A gentle awareness to geographies of the (non)human & (ir)responsibilities. University of Exeter.

Paper Presentation:  Safe-spaces? The gentle and ungentle geographies of planned discussion groups

Food practices are deeply personal, shaped by a complex interplay of material, sensory and symbolic factors (Fenko and Schifferstein 2012).  Eaters judge themselves and others through, and with, their food practices; and the stuff of fat is particularly contentious (Forth 2014).  My research used planned discussion groups (PDGs) (O'Reilly 2005) to explore the fatty eating habits of my participants.  Snowballing methods gave my participants control over the friends and family members with whom they shared the space of their PDG, and each session took place in the kitchen of that group’s gatekeeper.  The structure of the PDG’s created a familiar and 'safe' environment in which the fatty practices, narratives, beliefs and relationships of my participants could be explored.  Typically, the discussions opened with deceptively coherent accounts of fatty histories and habits (c.f. Coffey & Atkinson 1996), but quickly shifted to more reflexive explorations of the fragmented and contradictory relationships convoked by the stuff of fat. Within these conversations the human and non-human bodies and relationships entangled with and in the stuff of fat became present as things that matter, yet the tone of the discussions generated was far from gentle.  Situating this research within spaces that were ‘safe’ and familiar to my participants enabled them to disagree, talk across each other, mock each other, and accuse each other of ‘misremembering’.  This short paper explores these gentle – ungentle tensions in the doing of this research.

 

May 11 2016:

University of Exeter

£500 award to attend the RGS-IBG AC16

May 4 2016:

Invited discussant & panellist, Exeter Phoenix Arts Centre

Invited discussant and panellist exploring some of the issues raised in the film 'Just Eat It:  A Food Waste Story'.  I argued that 'playing with our food' creates an interlude from social norms where it is possible to rehearse changing our world.

April 13 2016:

PGR Development Workshop, University of Exeter

Workshop Lead:  Creative Journaling in Theory & in Practice

Theoretical and practical introduction to creative journaling as an innovative methodological approach to data generation, analysis, presentation and communication.

Learning Objectives:

1. Use mixed media in research for data generation, organisation, documentation and analysis.

2. Reflect on the experience of producing your own journal

3. Reflect on the possibilities for creative journaling as a methodological, organisational and presentational innovation as regards research processes and outputs

4. Situate creative journaling within critical theoretical perspectives on creative and participatory research methods

5. Begin to develop networks with other doctoral researchers interested in creative and participatory research methods

Session Feedback:  

“There was no part of this session which was not useful” 

“Great workshop.  Really enjoyed it and I feel it  unlocks my intellectual flow”

“Great! More radical stuff like this please”

“Let’s do this regularly"

“Hold similar sessions more often.  This would   (should be) essential to students at the beginning of their PG career”

“This was, without doubt, the most useful development session I have attended at Exeter”

 “More funding available for sessions like this”

April 2016 - present:

Geography, Exeter University

Co-convenor: Structured Social Writing Sessions (with Dr Sarah Dyer).

Twice weekly ‘Write Club’ for Geography PGRs, PostDocs & Academic Staff.

 

March 20 2016:

Spring Community Day, Exeter University

Stall in the 'Discover Zone' at Exeter University Community Fair

Margarine Taste-Test

At different times since its invention margarine has been made from cattle, whales, sunflowers, coal, palm, oil seed rape, herring and more.  Yet margarine is made to mimic the taste of butter.  Have you ever wondered why this is?  Come to our stall if you would like to taste homemade margarine made from sunflower seeds and a coconut.     

February 4 2016:

Departmental Seminar, University of Exeter

What Am I Gonna Spread On My Toast?  Distaste and knowing margarine matters

January 29 2016:

Researcher Led Initiative Award, Exeter University: £500

Workshop:  Creative Journaling in Theory and in Practice

November 3 2015 - November 3 2015:

SWDTC Annual Conference 2015, University of Bristol

Workshop: Surviving? Thriving? Coping? As a Parent, Carer, or Mature PhDer

Co-convener and facilitator (with Louise MacAllister and Paula Crutchlow)

September 2 2015 - September 4 2015:

RGS-IBG Annual Conference 2015, University of Exeter

Co-convener: Provocations and Possibilities 'in' and 'of' the 'Anthropocene'.  A postgraduate snapshot session sponsored by the SCGRG, and convened as part of my role as SCGRG postgraduate representative 2014-2015.

Call for Papers:  'This session will explore the different ways in which postgraduate researchers in Social and Cultural Geography are both engaging with and attending to the manifold provocations posed by the concept of the 'Anthropocene'. Postgraduates will present a brief ‘snapshot’ of their work (whether a photograph, a quotation, a field diary entry, an image of an object, or mini-video clip) as a focus for contributions that explore the ways in which their theoretical and/or methodological interventions are acting to work with and against the rise of the 'Anthropocene'. We encourage participants to fully utilise their snapshots in ways which further deepen and enrich the developing trajectories, tensions, and textures associated with the mobilisation of this concept'.

September 2 2015 - September 4 2015:

RGS-IBG Annual Conference, University of Exeter

Paper Presentation:  Matters of Fat:  Distaste and Knowing Food

‘I mean margarine, gross, it isn’t nice’

‘It’s like a petro-chemical’

‘It’s synthetic isn’t it, really fake and horrible’

‘It’s just not proper food’

During research interviews it became apparent that some consumers perceive margarine to be an edible non-food, a mysterious yellow oleaginous lump, which offers few clues as to its origins or its connectivities. For them margarine is distasteful. Yet all of the interviewees had willingly eaten margarine for at least some part of their lives.

My research troubled how these eaters experienced and made sense of margarine. I sought to create convivial encounters where people not only cooked and ate together, but where the stuff of food was present in unexpected and playful ways. Could the visceral encounters of crushing sunflower seeds, grinding a coconut, and whisking the resulting oils with egg yolk to make a home-cooked margarine cultivate a ‘trajectory of apprenticeship’ (Pignarre & Stengers 2011) in knowing the stuff of margarine and the bodies, relationships, and systems entangled with margarine?

This paper explores how beliefs about food matters frame and knot with everyday encounters with margarine, before reflecting on some of the knowledges and practices through which eaters come to value matter as food.

September 1 2015 - September 1 2015:

Co-convener, Food Matters Symposium: Tackling Systemic Food Waste. West Town Farm, Ide, Exeter.

Rationale:  Although food waste is beginning to appear on academic and political agendas there has been a tendency to frame the problem around individual food practices, and much less work has been done on how food becomes framed as waste at other nodes within food systems. Through employing a mixture of panel sessions, provocations, hands on sessions and group work, this symposium will bring together academics, food producers, food retailers and food activists in order to approach the problem of systemic food waste. We hope this symposium will enable a collaborative process of agenda setting for future research into food waste, food knowledges and food practices.

Conveners: Suzanne Hocknell & Dr Rebecca Sandover.

Welcome & Provocations:  Prof. Henry Buller (University of Exeter).

Panellists:  Dr. Megan Blake (University of Sheffield); Dr. Emma Roe (University of Southampton); Dr. Matt Reed (The Countryside and Community Research Institute); Andy Bragg (West Town Farm); Martyn Bragg (Shillingford Organics); and Kim Chenoweth (Devon and Cornwall Food Association).

Group Facilitators:  Dr Emma-Jayne Abbots (UWTSD); Dr Mags Adams (University of Salford); and Dr Agatha Herman (University of Reading).

Closing Remarks:  Prof. Elspeth Probyn (University of Sydney).

Abstract:  Food matters are increasingly contested as lively materials that shape issues around human health and wellbeing as well as impacting on ecosystems through their production, consumption and disposal. Food materials decay rendering food inedible. Food material can be seen as unknown, unfamiliar and undesirable for consumption. Food matters can contain anxieties over provenance, authenticity and wider material impacts on our ecosystems and our bodies. However solutions to knowing food, addressing food waste and increasing access to fresh food are contested. Examples of this include the use of waste food to address issues of food poverty, processing technologies precluding edible food from reaching the consumer, or food labelling inhibiting edible food from being consumed. Through this participatory event we seek to explore these issues by not only generating debate for academic research, but by also getting our hands on food matters, and engaging with local producers’ food stories and food knowledges. By incorporating practical hands- on sessions to produce our lunch with ‘waste’ food and hearing on-the-ground experiences of producers and activists, we seek to ground academic debate on production- consumption-waste pathways with the matter of food itself, and to co-create knowledges for ongoing research collaboration.

In the evening a symposium dinner will be hosted by Bristol Skipchen at a venue to be confirmed.

Organised in collaboration with:  Love Local Food, West Town Farm, OrganicARTS, Ashclyst Farm & Dairy, Shillingford Organics.  With support from the Nature, Materialities & Biopolitics (NaMBio) research group of the Department of Geography in the University of Exeter, the Social & Cultural Geography Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers (SCGRG RGS-IBG), the South-West Doctoral Centre of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC SWDTC), and the Catalyst Project at the University of Exeter.

March 26 2015 - March 26 2015:

Convener & Facilitator: Creative Methodologies Workshop

PGF RGS-IBG Mid-Term Conference, Sheffield

I was invited to convene and facilitate a session at the 2015 RGS-IBG mid-term conference. The workshop was an interactive pedagogical session aiming to explore how different methodological approaches not only describe but are performative, participating ‘in the enactment of…realities’ (Law 2004: 45).  The workshop made space for PhD researchers to reflect on methodologies as ‘enactments of relations - that make some things (representations, objects, apprehensions) present ‘in-here’, whilst making others absent ‘out-there’' (Law 2004: 14).

Each participant selected a broad area of sub-disciplinary research interest.  This enabled them to settle into four groups - urban geographies, food communities, mobilities, and development geographies – each with between two and six members.   Individually participants spent ten minutes drawing what they considered to be the key challenge in their research area, before summarising this drawing in a tweet.  Each sub-disciplinary group then took a further ten minutes to explain their drawings to each other, and discuss the common themes that were emerging.  In the latter twenty-five minutes of the workshop, participants continued to work within their groups in order to co-design a research project around the themes they had identified.

Within the groups, participants shared their knowledges and experiences of doing research so as to think about the advantages and limitations of a range of methodological approaches to the imagined research project, who and what the different methods include and exclude from consideration, and how different approaches enact different relations.

February 12 2015 - September 1 2015:

ESRC SWDTC Student-Collaboration Funding

£4,002 award to co-facilitate (with Dr Rebecca Sandover) a Food Matters Symposium, 'Food Waste, Visceral Learning & Knowing Food'.

Although food waste is beginning to appear on academic and political agendas there has been a tendency to frame the problem around individual food practices, and much less work has been done on how food becomes framed as waste at other nodes within food systems.  Through employing a mixture of panel sessions, provocations, hands on sessions and group work, this symposium will bring together academics, food producers, food retailers and food activists in order to approach the problem of food waste.  We hope this symposium will enable a collaborative process of agenda setting for future research into food waste, food knowledge and food practices.

January 29 2015 - January 29 2015:

NaMBio Research Group, Geography, University of Exeter

Presentation (with Dr Rebecca Sandover) of details of our planned 'Food Matters Symposium'.

Abstract: Food matters are increasingly contested as lively materials that shape issues around human health and wellbeing as well as impacting on ecosystems through their production, consumption and disposal. Food materials decay rendering food inedible.  Food material can be seen as unknown, unfamiliar and undesirable for consumption.  Food matters can contain anxieties over provenance, authenticity and wider material impacts into our ecosystems and our bodies. However solutions to knowing food, addressing food waste and increasing access to fresh food are contested. Examples of this are the use of waste food to address issues of food poverty, or how labelling prevents edible food from being consumed. Through this participatory event we seek to explore these issues by not only generating debate for academic research, but by also getting our hands on food matters, and engaging with local producers' food stories. By incorporating practical hands-on sessions to produce our lunch with 'waste' food and hearing on-the-ground experiences of producers and activists, we seek to ground academic debate on production-consumption-waste pathways with the matter of food itself.

January 20 2015 - January 21 2015:

Embodied Encounters Workshop: University of Wales Trinity Saint David (Lampeter)

Invited Participant - Embodied Encounters: Exploring the materialities of food 'stuffs' workshop (2).

Including paper presentation: Margarine logics and the co-construction of consumer and consumed.

Abstract:  To produce margarine, lively bodies are broken into parts - their fatty elements degummed, bleached, deodorized, fractionated and sterilized - before being reassembled and transformed into tubs of yellow fat.  In consuming margarine, lipids and human fold with gut microbiota, and together are entangled with industrial food practices, the labour of migrant workers, colonial histories, food security debates, public health policies, and socio-economic norms about who should eat what, and how much.  Margarine and margarine-consumers are thereby co-constructed.   The stuff of food folds with already present technologies and socio-political framings.  Within each framing margarine can be practised as care-full reciprocity with named bodies (allowing them a degree of liveliness, of becoming), yet multiple others are reduced, silenced, and consumed.  Nonetheless the trans fats expose can be understood as an example of lively non-human actants with-in the stuff of margarine transgressing framings of the stuff of food as passive resource.  Co-constructed relationships can be re-made, and Hayes-Conroy & Hayes-Conroy’s (2008) concept of ‘taking back taste’ provides a fruitful grounding for focus group work which, through making and tasting home-cooked margarine, engages visceral knowing as the basis for a care-full ethic of encounter with multiple lively human and non-human others entangled within the stuff of margarine.

October 30 2014:

Sharing the World, University of Bristol

Invited Panelist - Sharing the World.  A one-day ESRC sponsored event of shared talks and discussion with Luce Irigaray, Michael Marder, Judith Still and a panel of postgraduate and early career researchers.  Panelists were invited to reflect on their own work on commoning, practices of sharing, hospitality and ethics in relation to the emerging themes of the day.

August 28 2014:

RGS-IBG Annual Conference 2014, London

Co-convenor & chair (with Louise MacAllister) of SCGRG sponsored session:  Consumed, entangled, intermingled, co-constituted? Eating and the co-production of bodies

July 16 2014 - July 17 2014:

Food Justice Conference, University of Reading

Paper Presentation:  The Fat of the Land?  Margarine logics and the co-construction of consumer and consumed

Abstract:  Developed in response to a competition launched by Napoleon III for a ‘reasonably priced nutritive fat’ with which to feed a rapidly urbanizing population, margarine was one of the first modern foods.  Over time margarine has been constituted from cattle, whales, coal, cotton, herring, sunflowers, palm and more.  Research into eating habits has suggested that changes to individual food practices are difficult to implement.  Hence it could be argued that the adaptability of margarine to different ingredients, particularly to plant fats with high levels of omega-3, serves as a model for how we might eat healthily and sustainably whilst continuing to consume the foods we enjoy.

Nevertheless, the social, economic, and political circumstances of the development and deployment of food technologies, and food networks, matter.  When I eat margarine, lipids and human fold with gut microbiota, and together we are entangled with industrial food practices, the labour of migrant workers, colonial histories, food security debates, public health policies, and socio-economic  norms about who should eat what, and how much.  From RSPO certified, to organic, to cholesterol-lowering, within each framing margarine can be practiced as care-full reciprocity with named others (allowing them a degree of liveliness, of becoming), yet multiple others are reduced, bounded, silenced and consumed.  This paper examines the history of margarine production, together with the more recent development of margarine as omega-3 containing functional food, so as to make present the interplay of social, economic, technological, and political logics that frame and co-construct consumer and consumed.

May 22 2014:

Postgraduate Research Enhancement Fund, CLES, University of Exeter

£499.65 funding to cover expenses of an unexpected research opportunity.  The award allowed me to attend an industry conference at which I made connections which opened doors to fieldwork at multiple points across my research field.

January 2014 - June 2014:

Latour Reading Group, University of Exeter

Meeting facilitator for interdisciplinary group reading Latour's 'An Inquiry into Modes of Existence'.

October 10 2013:

Postgraduate Research Enhancement Fund, CLES, University of Exeter

£500 awarded in order to fund an unexpected research opportunity.  The grant allowed me to attend a training course for oils and fats industry professionals at which I made connections which opened doors to fieldwork at multiple points across my research field.

May 13 2013:

Postgraduate Seminar, University of Exeter

Paper presentation:  The Fat of the Land?  Eating-well with margarine assemblages

November 2012 - November 2015:

SWDTC ESRC Postgraduate Conference

2015 Workshop: Surviving? Thriving? Coping? As a Parent, Carer, or Mature PhDer

Co-convener and facilitator (with Louise MacAllister & Paula Crutchlow)

2014 'Integrating Perspectives' adviser to the organising committee.                      

2013 'Knowledge Beyond Borders' member of the organising committee.  

As a member of the organising committee for this inter-disciplinary student-led conference, I had particular responsibility for accessibility.  As part of this remit I worked with members of the Exeter Athena SWAN Committee, Human Resources, and the University Family Centre in order to make the option of childcare a possibility for this conference.

The conference theme was chosen to speak to three topics: impact, dialogue and collaboration, and transitions. The day consisted of a range of workshops, student presentations, lectures and a panel discussion.           

2012 'Researcher Meet World' conference volunteer.

CV: Membership of Professional Bodies/Professional Qualifications

2017-present:

Member of the Food Research Collaboration

2017-present:

Member of NAMRIP

2015-present:

Associate Fellow of the HEA.

2015-present:

Ordinary Committee Member of the SCGRG RGS-IBG

2015-present:

Web and Social Media Officer: Food Geographies Working Group of the RGS-IBG

2014-2015:

SCGRG RGS-IBG Postgraduate Representative

2013-present:

Postgraduate Fellow RGS-IBG

2012-present:

Member: Natures, Materialities and Biopolitics Research Group, Geography, University of Exeter