CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Shynkarenko, Svitlana |
|---|---|
| Title | To Feed the Social Body: The Comparative Study of Places of Food Redistribution for Low-Income People in Vienna |
| Summary | In this thesis, I study food redistribution services for low-income people in Vienna. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at two sites —SOMA Sozialmarkt and Le+O (Lebensmittel und Orientierung) —I explore how food, as a matter of everyday nutritional necessity, becomes a symbolic actor and tool that embodies political rationalities. The thesis utilises the concepts of ‘feeding the social body’ and ‘staginess’ as a framework to demonstrate how places of food redistribution for low-income individuals organise the temporal, spatial, and emotional dynamics of governing specific categories of population. I argue that separate shopping areas for low-income people also function as spaces to reproduce spatial exclusion and enact forms of neoliberal governmentalities in the implementation of distributive politics. Expectations from the service provider frame consumers' behaviour in separate shopping areas for low-income individuals. Being a receiver of social benefit and being a consumer in a space that pretends to be an ‘average’ grocery shop results in misrecognition, miscommunication, conflictual emotional outcomes and resistance. This thesis contributes to anthropological and interdisciplinary discussion on food redistribution and the neoliberal transformation of welfare. Ethnography reveals how food functions as a mediator through which moral economies, the social ordering, and neoliberal governmentalities become materialized and thus recognized. |
| Supervisor | Naumescu Vlad, Vedres Balazs |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/shynkarenko_svitlana.pdf |
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