Flow:
Supermarkets and the
Movement of Food and People.
Sadler Seminar series 2015-6.
Final report.
This Sadler Seminar series took the form of three informal, interdisciplinary discussion
sessions followed by a larger and more international event. The vast majority of its £1000
budget was devoted to this final session, which brought the noted novelist Ewan Morrison
and the young Americanist scholar Lily Kelting to the university. Before then our meetings
were more modest in scale, and were framed as discussion groups rather than as seminar
presentations before audiences. This reading group or roundtable structure has seemed to aid
the development of the group’s core idea of flow and the structure of collaborative grant
applications which will be submitted over the summer. One might say that these meetings
took the form of “sandboxes,” “ideas labs,” or “roundtables”; it is certainly the case that this
series has been at its most enjoyable when it has brought Leeds and other UK scholars into
discussion from across the disciplines, and it remains the hope that these encounters—and
especially with the geographer David Bell, with History’s Simon Hall, with the psychologist
Yael Benn, and with Transport Studies’ Ian Jones—will form the basis for a persuasive
collaborative grant application, specifically to the AHRC Research Grant scheme, over the
weeks to come.
Sadler Seminar Meetings.
Flow’s three informal meetings were all based on readings suggested by different members of
the group. All are available at our website along with more detailed descriptions of the
intellectual and discursive questions we were asking of each. These meetings ran as follows:
FRIDAY 6 NOVEMBER, 1:00-3:00PM:
Supermarkets and the American 1950s
Tracey Deutsch, Building a Housewife's Paradise (2012)
The planning of our first roundtable discussion led to what promises to become one of the
most important intellectual connections we have forged during the life of Flow. In preparing
for this meeting I took concerted efforts to draw together a new network, and held or sought
to arrange preliminary meetings with David Bell, the Leeds Indie food festival’s Matt Dix,
Les Firbank, Simon Hall, Ian Jones, Aaron Meskin, Brendon Nicholls, the Cambridge
anthropologist Michael Vine, Waitrose Food magazine, the Jamie Oliver Foundation, and
(via Skype) Yael Benn, Lily Kelting as well as Deutsch herself. Some of these approaches
were far more successful than others, and I revisit my efforts to engage with the industry
below, but Deutsch proved particularly helpful, and even scanned a large portion of her
supermarket history for our first reading group. This led to a very enjoyable initial discussion
involving the original small core of Sadler Seminar delegates--Bell, Benn, Nicholls, Hall—as
well as English PGRs Simon Sandison, Angus Young and Jiachel Zhang.
FRIDAY 4 DECEMBER, 2:00-4:00PM:
Supermarkets, Nutrition and Responsibility
Frank Cochoy and Catherine Grandclément-Chaffy, "Publicizing Goldilocks' Choice at the
Supermarket. The Political Work of Shopping Packs, Carts and Talk" (2005)
One of the biggest challenges in organising the Sadler Seminar meetings was how to translate
expressions of goodwill and even intellectual curiosity into meaningful collaboration and the
investment of time. Workload and the at once impressive and overwhelming number of
competing meetings held at the university meant that it could sometimes feel difficult to build
audiences beyond the core team of delegates I have listed above. This was perhaps most
evident for our December meeting—but so was the seminar series’ capacity to continue,
despite this, to forge very promising individual intellectual connections. My Artynet
announcement of a second reading group, based on an emerging engagement with French
cultural studies scholarship produced under the influence of Bruno Latour, led Ian Jones from
Transport Studies to get in touch, opening a new line of collaborative engagement with his
work on the DEMAND project. The resulting conversation between Benn and Jones, cued by
the essay’s wonderful provocations about shopping trolleys and choice, turned out to be a
wonderfully rich and memorable moment in the seminar series, and one we are drawing upon
in the collaborative application to follow. I think I found this an instructive case where all my
stress about poor attendance and faltering momentum actually melted away in the exchange
itself, as it became apparent that the six attendees were all engaged in the different
disciplinary perspectives being navigated in Jones and Benn’s discussion.
FRIDAY 5 FEBRUARY, 1:00-3:00PM:
Daniel Miller, "Making Love in Supermarkets" (1998)
For our third Sadler Seminar we focused on an essay which David Bell suggested, and which
was for him, and for some but not all others in the discussion, classic: Daniel Miller's
anthropological analysis A Theory of Shopping (1998). Apart from its other qualities this
essay exhibits Miller’s great gift for storytelling and it was wonderful to have such literary
scholars as Nicholls and Sandison in attendance to reflect upon it anew. Like the one before it
the meeting also attracted new connections with individual scholars, and, in this case,
especially with the Italian scholar Alesso Baldini. (Baldini’s Made in Italy teaching and
research project is clearly distinctive from yet intersects interestingly with Flow, and I would
like to involve him in our future work if possible.) The meeting was also useful because as a
result of our discussion it was very clear that Miller’s work is helpfully illuminating yet
incomplete: he focuses on the emotional lives of individual shoppers far more than on the
environment of the supermarket itself, yet it is the planning of this environment (and of the
trolleys that move through it) that concerns us most of all. Emerging from this discussion was
thus an increasingly defined sense of what our project is and how it differs from seminal
work in the past (even Grandclement-Chaffey, despite being something of an acolyte of
Latour’s, focuses rather more on individual psychology than the external, designed world of
the supermarket itself).
19 May 2016
AFTER THE FLOW
For our final meeting we turned away from the roundtable format and held an academic and
literary presentation at the School of English’s Alumni room. With an audience of around 25,
and pulling together all of Flow’s core collaborators, we welcomed Lily Kelting to the School
of English for our initial panel. For this Warnes offered a reading of Ginsberg’s canonical
“Supermarket in California” by way of introducing the group’s theorisation of Flow, while
Kelting then related it to the peculiar circumstances of Cold War Berlin, showing how a
culture of car and shopping flow persisted there even amidst the enclosed circumstances of
the Cold War. Our event then turned to a reading from the novelist Ewan Morrison, who
offered excerpts from his novel Tales from the Mall and reflections on the vocation of
literature in an age of accelerating and increasingly privatised consumerism. Informal
feedback from the day was very positive indeed, and has had the effect of emboldening the
network as it turns to collaborative grant capture, and of establishing a key cultural friendship
in our relationship with Morrson.
Presentations / Activities
Thanks to its status as a university-funded Sadler Seminar, and perhaps also to the visibility
of the website I created last summer, these core meetings have been accompanied by a range
of other activities. In January I appeared on Radio Four’s Food Programme and was quizzed
at some length about the local history of supermarkets in Leeds. This led in turn to an
invitation to present our collaborative network to Food Science, a new line of connection
which I will be revisiting in future. I have also presented the work of the group in a Paul
Robeson Seminar I gave at the University of Swansea, while it will form the subject of a
keynote lecture I have been invited to give next September as part of the Food for All series
at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Past Applications.
The network has formed the basis of a series of grant applications which have met with
modest but not insignificant success. Over the duration of the seminar series two applications
to the Leverhulme Trust, a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, and an Independent
Social Research Foundation application have been unsuccessful. More positively, however, a
travel grant application to the Smithsonian Institute’s Lemelson Center has secured $1500 for
a research visit in September, while the Raymond Williams Society contributed £100 towards
Flow’s final event. As well as enabling us to pursue our key activities, these modest sums in
addition to the £1000 that the LHRI has invested in the seminar series do demonstrate both
internal and external support for our work, and will be highlighted in our forthcoming AHRC
bid.
New Applications and Publication Plans.
It has become clear over the course of the seminar programme that US scholars and
publishers are interested in supporting our work. It’s also been clear that they are wary of its
collaborative character. For other projects senior US academics have told me publishers are
moving away from essay collections, a perception that has then been confirmed for me by
OUP New York, for example. And it is true that OUP’s interest in the project cooled after it
became apparent that it would involve multiple authors, while Columbia were very
enthusiastic but turned it down for this specific reason. At the same time I have been invited
to write a chapter on the subject for Cambridge University Press’s forthcoming Food and
Literature volume while editors at California and Georgia have been eager to solicit from me
a proposal along traditional “lone scholar” lines. So there is something of a tension, perhaps,
or mismatch, between the AHRC’s Research Grant agenda, with its onus on collaborative
work, and the more orthodox approaches that still hold sway in US circles and perhaps in
traditional academic publishing, not to mention our REF, in this country too. As a result I
have found myself in a bit of a bind, torn between possible future opportunities: Flow could
turn into a prestigious monograph, or it could turn into a collaboration that the AHRC would
fund, but it is has not been easy figuring out how it could be both.
I think I have now come up with a solution to this. The White Rose University Press are keen
on the project and have mentioned an interest in investing up to £2000 that would help us to
publish it in an open access forum. Although opinions differ on open access outlets, even
within the AHRC, such publishers were prominent at its recent Commons event in York, and
share priorities--of inclusivity, transparency and impact—with its various funding schemes.
That our topic is so universal and everyday strengthens the case for us to place the future
work of our collaborative network in such an open and public forum. At the same time,
California have invited me to submit a proposal on this subject for their short essay series
How X Explains Y, a proposal which in the case would be titled How the Shopping Cart
Explains Global Capitalism. This would be around 40,000 words and so could – could -- be
a relatively efficient route for me to take to secure a 4* output. As such (and beyond the
Cambridge essay which I mention and which will be based on the Ginsberg and Jarrell
readings I have already delivered to launch and conclude Flow) the future strategy for Flow
involves two strands:
1. How the Shopping Cart Explains Global Capitalism. Kate Marshall at California is
enthusiastic about the proposal I submitted for her short series of provocations. I am
hopeful. If it is successful this publication should provoke considerable interest in the
US in particular thanks to existing networks I have there. If I do a good enough job it
could also present a further 4* output for the university in time for REF 2020.
2. The culmination of the programme, the AHRC Research Grant will meanwhile draw
upon the investments of the White Rose University Press as well as of the
Smithsonian, Raymond Williams Society, and the LHRI, in order to present our group
as a fully-formed and substantial unit which now requires some external investment to
bring its ideas to a public audience. The team to be listed for this application (Jones,
Benn, Nicholls, Hall, Bell, Kelting, Warnes) is interdisciplinary and international and
thus fits the priorities of the AHRC Research Funding Guide. I aim to strengthen our
application further by listing Tracey Deutsch as an international consultant (she has
agreed to this) and by developing fledgling links with ASDA. As I mention above
engaging with the industry has been a real challenge for this project—supermarkets
are involved in acute competition with each other and generally regard academic
approaches with some suspicion—and my attempts to reach out to the M & S Archive
and the Jamie Oliver Foundation proved likewise fruitless. But I now have an
informal “in” with ASDA and feel I have something more tangible to offer to them,
and this could further strengthen our bid. (My aim is to present two project partners to
the AHRC—the WRUP, who hopefully will offer a contract and confirm their
willingness to invest in the publication, and ASDA, who I hope will offer some
modest support in return for supportive publicity.) I also gave a short presentation
with Simon Sandison at the recent AHRC Commons event and I hope that our
involvement in that day will be noted by AHRC assessors; it has certainly attuned me,
I believe, to their emergent funding priorities. The aim is to secure a semester of leave
for each collaborator during 2017-8 in order to deliver the collaborative book
manuscript by summer 2018.
Reflections
I have found this Sadler Seminar series very positive and enabling. It has been a big
undertaking, and I am not sure I could have managed it if I had not been in position, in
Autumn 2015, of being on leave having written a book for REF2020—this enabled me to
dedicate time to planning meetings and writing applications I would not otherwise have had.
And frustrations and doubts did crop up here and there. Engaging with the industry has been
a bit like introducing one’s head to a brick wall, and the different agendas I mention above—
between what we want, what funders want, and what publishers want—have been difficult to
reconcile. But I think what has begun to emerge out of quite a difficult and sometimes
frustrating situation are some exciting plans, hopefully for funded collaboration, and certainly
for funded international research and REF-able publication. I suspect the website that I
developed as part of the seminar programme has been a really useful tool in showing
academic observers in the US in particular exactly what the project is about. Senior figures at
the Smithsonian, publishers, academics, etc., have all responded very positively having
perused what is basically the abstract of Flow posted on its homepage. What has also really
worked and been enjoyable are the new individual working relationships that I’ve established
as a result of this work. Without the Sadler Seminar series I doubt I would have met David
Bell, Ewan Morrison, Alesso Baldini, Ian Jones and Yael Benn or had such interesting and
illuminating conversations with them. I’ve really enjoyed them, and am now hopeful the
AHRC share my enthusiasm. Above all the LHRI’s investment in this work has given me a
great sense of belief in its worthiness, and I am very grateful to have had this opportunity to
develop the network in all the different ways I describe above.