SAFN Student Research Award Winner!

The 2023 SAFN Student Research Award goes to Samantha Brown for her project entitled, “Fermented Futures: The Place of Iginneq in Danish Fine Dining.” Samantha’s project considers the increasing use of traditional Inuit foods — specifically iginneq, fermented seal blubber from S. Greenland) — in European fine dining. This project considers the complexity of food sovereignty, colonialism, and the tensions between celebrating and appropriating indigenous foodways. Our reviewers found Samantha’s project novel–with a grounded and detailed research plan. They are excited to see the project come to fruition.

Samantha Ruth Brown is a fourth-year PhD Candidate in Geography with a specialization in Food Studies at the University of Oregon. Her research broadly uses food as a lens for studying systems of power and resistance in Denmark and Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland). Her previous scholarship analyzed the so-called Danish “meatball war”—a conflict about serving pork in public institutions as a means of preserving Danish culture or serving halal- and kosher-friendly foods in order to accommodate diverse student populations—as a lens for understanding how whiteness is operationalized, other processes of racialization/racism, restrictive migration policies, and lessened access to social reproductive state services in Denmark. This work was recently published as part of a chapter in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Schools and Religion and is forthcoming in 2024 as an article in Digest: A Journal of Foodways and Culture.

Now, Samantha is working on two projects related to food practices in Greenland. The first project considers recent guidelines that emphasize more plants and less meat, what these guidelines mean for Arctic communities, and what lessons can be drawn from traditional Greenlandic Inuit food practices for how we might re-imagine a different food system. The second project—which is funded in part by the SAFN Student Research Award—considers the use of traditional Greenlandic Inuit foods in European fine dining. Focusing on the potential use of iginneq (fermented seal blubber from South Greenland), this project involves ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews that aim to understand how South Greenlandic communities experience and think about the export and decontextualization of their traditional foods in fine dining settings. This question is situated within a period of time where many Greenlanders are advocating for greater self-definition through increased independence from Denmark, and where many fine dining chefs are incorporating more traditional indigenous and/or fermented foods into their menus. Both projects are in collaboration with Dr. Aviaja Lyberth Hauptmann, an Inuk (Greenlandic Inuit) microbiologist whose scholarship concerns traditionally fermented Greenlandic foods.

Samantha brings to this work a B.A. and M.A. in Scandinavian Studies, three years of experience working at an international refugee NGO, and lots of inspiration from anthropologists of food, race, and migration. When she’s not busy with her research and teaching, you’ll likely find her at home working on her own fermentation projects, on a long walk with a podcast, or spending time with friends.