Reflections
Reflections
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This section presents reflections and thoughts emerging from fieldwork, seminars, meetings, encounters, and readings. If you are interested in walking with us through our questions and thoughts you are welcome!
You can contact us on our email: foce@unito.it
Women stirring ugali in Terrat, Simanjiro, Tanzania. Photo by Ruth W John, Oct. 22, 2024.
Chiara’s father stirring polenta at a family barbecue. Unknown photographer, 2000 circa. Chiara Rabbiosi personal archive.
Stirring Stories from Ugali to Polenta
Stirring Stories from Ugali to Polenta
25th August 2025
Chiara Rabbiosi
In the last five years, I have been experimenting extensively with creative methods, moving from photo-elicitation in focus groups to film-making, from walking methods to curating exhibitions. They have been essential companions in research, teaching, and what is sometimes called scientific popularization. They feel like a magic tool: they allow me to speak to different interlocutors, exchange ideas, learn together, collect “data,” organize it, and let knowledge evolve.
For me, creative methods are also a way to remain close to my favourite theoretical approaches and perspectives. As a geographer, I see bodies and places as inseparable, and creative methods allow me to discuss them in terms of enactments, becomings, and performances—rather than reducing them to mere practices or, conversely, to representations.
The Foce project was originally conceived with a strong focus on visual methodologies, including participatory film-making. Yet, while working closely with Ruth and Angela, we realized this might not have been appropriate, given the sensitivities around image-taking among Maasai communities. Moreover, could a strictly participatory framework truly work with a community we were engaging with for the first time? Wouldn’t it risk becoming just another academic exercise imposed on them? For these reasons, we instead opted for broader storytelling techniques, better suited to the context of our research, and complemented them with photo-elicitation to support interactions with the Maasai of Terrat, Simanjiro District, Tanzania (see Kronenburg García, Rabbiosi, John, 2025).
The image I am most attached to from the Foce research experience doesn’t come from fieldwork in Tanzania, though. It is, instead, an image of my father cooking polenta, a (generally) maize-based staple that was once a daily meal in rural Italian communities. Today it is mainly consumed during family gatherings or as a heritagized food at public events. I shared the photo on our Tanzania unit WhatsApp group, in response to a picture of ugali-making that Ruth had taken during fieldwork in late October 2024.
Storytelling as a method of research on food
Storytelling as a method of research on food
25th January 2025
Angela Kronenburg García, Chiara Rabbiosi, Ruth Wairimu John
We are writing this first reflection on our methodology in the time span between two fieldworks, one done by Ruth alone in October 2024 and one that we will do together in February 2025. During these three months, we have been moving back and forth with Ruth’s field notes to reflect and prepare for our next field visit. Ruth’s notes include long discussions with Mzee Maro (a pseudonym). Mzee is the designation given to a respected elder. In fact, Mzee Maro was given the task by the local authorities to accompany Ruth during her fieldwork in Terrat. Through her discussions with him and with other members of the community, it became clear that a structured participatory action-research methodology based on visual methods was not suitable, and possibly problematic, in the context of Terrat.
Research and relationality
Research and relationality
15th July 2024
Beatrice Ferlaino, Tamara Taher, Ginevra Montefusco
Research is a process in which the researcher interacts with multiple and diverse levels while she develops her questions. Far from being a solitary activity of theoretical study and elaboration, it is rooted in daily and complex relations with numerous spaces and actors which constantly question the researcher herself. Reflexivity on one’s own position and on how we practice our relationships with environments, people and contexts we encounter while doing research is not a separate section that we do after research or only in writing, but is rather a constant element in both theory-making and analysis and in “fieldwork” and research practice.
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