Food & Pleasure: Principles, Collaboration & Innovation in Research & Scholar Activism

Memefest, a social design network of scholar activists, students, and practitioners seeks to create change through community and creative action at the grassroots. The focus is on the margins and uniting around shared goals and interests across environmental, social and political challenges. The network addresses existential issues such as food democracy, climate justice and human rights. Our interdisciplinary network of artists, designers, activists and academics moves beyond thinking of instrumental 'innovation' to explore radical interdependencies through conceptualisations of collaboration related to care, pleasure and other strategies of sustainable development based on cultural exchange. Drawing on new techniques in media ethnography, we bridge multi-disciplines and actualise issues from the outside (extra disciplinary) and inside (intra disciplinary) in order to mobilise social change (towards a non-extractive epistemology). We take as our starting point local cultures of knowledge production as they exist within and between academia, practice and social movements. We begin our analysis through the dynamic lens of collaboration to ask: What does innovation look like in radical media, design and communication projects? What are the complexities of doing ethnography on the ground or as 'outsiders' and scholar activists? Is collaboration a help or a hindrance?