Things that Tempt: Experiencing Taste through Objects we Use to Eat

Dr. Richman-Kenneally will present and discuss various conceptual designs that are meant to make people think about food, cooking and design through the material culture and built environment that are thereby defamiliarized. Examples of such defamiliarized experimental design might include cutlery whose material and shape remind people that food comes from natural resources as part of a historical and material continuum. In her presentation, Dr. Richman-Kenneally will challenge assumptions of prescribed but unsustainable kitchen design that can be seen in magazines today, and offer these as a way to rethink some current priorities about food and taste.

Dr. Rhona Richman Kenneally is an Associate Professor of Design & Computation Arts at Concordia University, and a Faculty Member of Concordia’s School of Canadian Irish Studies. She holds a BA in English literature, an MA in Canadian history, and a professional degree and PhD in architecture. Her conference papers and publications address food, culture, and identity in Canada and Ireland, and she has also studied the role architecture, landscape, and material culture in the construction of Irish and Canadian-Irish identity. She has co-organized conferences on design and social activism, constructions of identity in Ireland and Quebec, the domestic foodscape, and Expo 67. She is co-editor of a collection of essays on Expo 67, another on the material culture of home in Ireland, as well as special issues of the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies and the Material Culture Review. Rhona is the founder and coordinator of a research group on Food Culture under Concordia’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture, and is also the editor of the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies.

Open to the public.