Trust as a sensory mode of engaging culturally diverse communities in net zero futures

ABSTRACT

This article examines the role of trust – as a sensory mode of knowing and engaging in everyday environments – in generating community-based routes toward sustainable futures in a culturally diverse situation. To do this we outline a theory of trust and apply trust as a conceptual frame for understanding international students’ relationships to their everyday environments. We focus on how trust can participate in carving new pathways to net zero carbon emissions, in processes whereby decolonization and decarbonization become interwoven trajectories. In doing so, we draw on ethnographic research undertaken with culturally diverse local and international students and staff on a university campus committed to working toward net zero emissions. Treating such sites as living labs for investigating how net zero comes about simultaneously demonstrates and surfaces the role of sensory and embodied modes of trust and engagement in this process. Thus, we argue that trust and the sensory knowing it entails offer a conceptual and practical prism with applications across community initiatives.

KEYWORDS:

• International students
• multiculturalism
• decolonization
• trust
• net zero carbon emissions
• sensory ethnography

Introduction

In this article, we examine the role of trust – as a sensory mode of knowing and engaging in everyday environments – in generating culturally diverse, community-based routes toward sustainable futures. We are concerned in particular with how trust can participate in carving new pathways to net zero carbon emissions, in processes whereby decolonization and decarbonization become interwoven trajectories. We understand “trust” design anthropologically, as inextricable from how everyday life is experienced and how it proceeds, as we slip over from the present to the immediate future. Trust is a feeling, or category of feeling, which describes both what it means to feel confident in the circumstances in which we find ourselves and anticipatory sensations toward what may happen next (Pink 2021, 197). Thus, we argue that trust and the sensory knowing it entails offer a conceptual and practical prism with applications across transition processes. In this article, we apply trust as a conceptual frame for understanding international students’ sensorial engagements in, and with, the socialites and materialities of their everyday environments, through the experiences of cooking and eating.

Our research has shown that while culturally diverse international students’ often felt uncomfortable sharing their food and eating practices with students from other cultures, conversely, community gardening was a site where trusted multi-cultural encounters with sustainable food production could begin. We focus on the possibilities opened up by community gardening elsewhere, here through a detailed focus on one participant, Persie (introduced below) and his research encounter with Emma Quility (research fellow), we unpack the sensory and social relations that can characterize eating in a multicultural context. In doing so, we consider how “it is indeed through racialized Othering that climate change proceeded and proceeds,” which climate justice scholar Farhana Sultana (2022b, 6) argues requires confronting and dismantling colonial ideologies and racisms baked into power hierarchies, including those that create and maintain climate breakdown. We begin by sketching out the background of this study, which involved ethnographic research undertaken with culturally diverse local and international students and staff on a university campus committed to working toward net zero emissions. This is followed by a discussion of our theoretical approach to trust which we then apply as a conceptual frame for understanding international students’ relationships to their everyday environments. We then discuss the encounter between Persie and Emma followed by Emma’s visit to the Wholefoods cafe through the lens of “convivial cultures,” building on work by Gilroy (2004) and Singh (2023).

Background

Australia has committed to achieving net zero emissions by 2050, an ambitious target. In 2021, the federal government announced¹ its Long-Term Emissions Reduction Plan, the cornerstone of this plan “prioritising technologies that can cut emissions while creating jobs.”

National approaches to transitions attempt to unify industry, education, state governments, and cities together to move toward a vision for Australia to exist with net zero emissions. Transition management was originally developed to assist governments create these types of future visions together with short-term action plans for sustainable development. Increasingly, this approach is being applied at the city-scale (Nevens et al. 2013). The impacts of transition management have their limitations largely because transition management fails to connect with the real-life challenges experienced by the participants involved and “must pay more attention to the difficulties, conflicts and tensions that arise during the implementation phase” (Nagorny-Koring and Nochta 2018, 68). It is particularly important to explore this in the settler colonial context of Australia, the historicity of which impacts the future success of any initiative.

Sensory experience and practice in everyday life is therefore infrequently foregrounded in transition management approaches (Sharp et al. 2022). We suggest paying further attention to everyday life values, through the lens of what it feels like – sensorially and affectively – to become involved in, and to trust in mundane and often invisible, practices that support transition to net zero. This, we argue, can generate new insights into how transition comes about “on the ground,” and thus underpin new understandings of what elements of successful transition might look like.

To demonstrate this, we draw on findings from sensory video ethnographies produced during the first stage of the “Net Zero Precincts: an interdisciplinary approach to decarbonising cities” project at Monash University (Victoria, Australia).² Our research draws on our findings based on a sample of 30 participants who live and work in the Monash Net Zero precinct. We take a reflexive focus on participants’ experiences and how these were articulated through fieldwork with Emma. Rather than reporting on generalized insights from all our findings, our approach is to frame the discussion with our wider findings, but to demonstrate our argument through a detailed encounter between Emma and one participant. Such an approach is common in anthropology, where narratives with as few as one or two research participants can be centered (see, for example, ethnographic work by Shostak 2000; Desjarlais 2003 and Schüll 2014).

Theoretically speaking, we are concerned with developing a nonrepresentational, ethnographically informed re-thinking of how trust is situated in everyday life on campus. When universities are designed, there are multiple social and political factors that influence this process that lay the groundwork for the cultural norms and values. Ramirez and Christensen (2013, 697) suggest that under the theory of path dependency these “initial preconditions and cultural features later on will heavily influence how the institution is developing, i.e. cultural ‘roots’ decide the ‘routes further taken’.” In transition management, habits and path dependencies are often seen as major technology and infrastructure obstacles to reaching net zero (Goldstein et al. 2023). Taking a design anthropological approach, we re-frame this obstacle as an opportunity – to reimagine new multicultural “routes” toward net zero.

The Monash Clayton campus provided the ideal context for both our wider research into net zero precincts and as a site through which to investigate the sensorial and affective dimensions of trust as it comes about in an everyday environment. The campus was founded in 1958 and is the second oldest university in the state. The Clayton campus occupies enough space (kms) that is classified as a suburb with its own postcode. This space also includes six (on-campus) halls of residence that are home to several thousand students. The halls of residence each feature their own community garden, each of which are smaller versions of the community garden in the center of the campus and the Monash University Community Farm which is located on the margin of the campus boundary. Most of the residence halls are located in the north-east corner of the campus which is a short walk from the tranquil and beautiful settings of the Science Center lake. Directly adjacent to the lake is the Aboriginal Garden, which features plants and trees originally used by the South-Eastern and Eastern Aboriginal people of Australia. The campus tours often included these green and open spaces, favored by participants because of the sensations of calm and peacefulness they evoke for them.

The precinct is moreover a multicultural site. However, transition management emerges from and represents the colonial relations of power, often uses terminologies, such as “social licence,” which are commonly used in the extractive industries (Adey et al. 2022), and seeks to do transition to people and places, rather than by taking into account the multicultural dimensions of how diverse people already participate in sustainable practices. This is particularly pertinent since the city of Monash describes itself as “a diverse multicultural community, representing many nations of the world.” In an article published by SBS (Australia’s national broadcaster), Clayton, where the precinct is located, was described as Australia’s most diverse suburb,³ in a country where “multiculturalism” is an essential part of the Australian national identity. Critical race theorist Sara Ahmed (2000, 95) defines multiculturalism as a “way of imagining the nation itself, a way of ‘living’ in the nation, and a way of living with difference.” Thus, making the net zero precinct an ideal site through which to ask and investigate how trusted processes and experiences of transition might best come about, set in the social and material circumstances of a multicultural place, and ultimately nation. For us, this means asking what we might learn when we are attentive to the ways in which multicultural situations can foster sustainable practices, as well as investigating how we might ensure that transition takes on the characteristics of a trusted route to “living with difference” (Ahmed 2000, 95), rather than following the trajectories of the extractive industries to win “social licence” (Adey et al. 2022).

Sensory ethnographic trust in practice

To investigate how people experienced, engaged with, and imagined futures for the net zero precinct, we designed a sensory ethnography approach. In this section, we explain our approach, and then, by way of an example we demonstrate how sensory ethnographic trust can come about in fieldwork. Sensory ethnography (Pink 2015) involves researchers exploring directly and attending to the serendipitous ways that sensory categories and experiences surface in fieldwork. It encompasses a wide range of existing and emergent ethnographic methods, but of particular relevance here is its development in the form of video ethnographies focused on walking and touring methods (Pink 2007), and methods which involve sharing the spaces, practices, and other activities with participants including eating (e.g. Sutton 2001) or participating in activities such as martial arts (e.g. Downey 2014). We developed video tour walking methods in order to better understand how participants experienced and constituted place as they moved through the precinct, and time spent with them at the sites to which they led us, following their lead in relation to what they wished to share and show us while keeping to script with our research checklist. This enabled us to treat the precinct itself as a part of what Sarah Pink (2015, 48) has called an “ethnographic place,” constituted through, amongst other things, the participants in research, the fieldwork site of the precinct itself, as well as our own participation in and representation of the materialities, sensations, and affect and imaginaries that were part of them.

We were keen to understand how the sites of our ethnography were constituted as dynamic spaces through the experiences and practices of research participants, and through the reflexivity of ethnographers’ sensorial and embodied encounters with them. Seeing sensory ethnography as opening up for us places as they “occur along the lifepaths of beings” (Ingold 2008, 1808) which meant that our very research practice involved working with participants to define and understand how certain sites within the precinct generated sensory and affective intensities for them, which were simultaneously specifically related to the precinct’s own journey toward net zero carbon emissions. Thus, seeking to address a situation where as Sultana suggests, “[t]he epistemically ignored, invalidated, or discounted may be largely invisible to those in power but are visible and viscerally related to those inhabiting Othered communities and spaces” (2022b, 102638). In doing so, we sought to connect sensory ethnographic practice to applied and change-making agendas and decolonizing approaches.

In this project, we added to our investigations a particular lens, facilitated through the concept of trust. We wished to understand how relations, sensations, and feelings of trust formed part of the ways in which participants experienced the precinct, as well as when trust was absent, and to consider when there may be new possibilities to generate trusted situations. This was because we particularly sought to understand how the sense of confidence in moving forward that is engendered in feelings of trust would enable participants to take steps toward the ambitions of net zero, in what circumstances would they trust, and how were these circumstances constituted. In viewing our research findings through this lens, we also understood our own research relationships with participants through the prism of trust. Ethnographic research relations are conventionally viewed reflexively, as relations of respect, sharing, and indeed, while they are not usually described in methodological research as relations of trust, they in fact correspond with the way in which we define trust; we understand trust as a feeling that emerges within circumstances where people feel confident and sufficiently familiar to open themselves to the possibilities of what may happen next (Pink 2023). That is trust, in our definition (and as other anthropologists, such as Alberto Corsín Jiménez (2011) have emphasized), is not a transactional relation between two separate parties, but rather emergent from the openness of each party to each other. As feminist philosopher Trudy Govier (1992, 20) pointed out, the fixation with a contractual model of trust, advocated by philosophical men, reduces trust to something that occurs between the “cool distanced relations between more or less free and equal adult strangers” (Govier 1992, 19). She critiques this model, highlighting that it omits crucial elements of care, intimacy, and reciprocity. Returning to the metaphors of transition noted above, similarly, trust as we define it is not part of a transactional relationship where a less powerful group gives a more powerful group “social licence” to act. Rather, trust is more plausibly regarded as part of respectful modes of “living with difference,” in which certain intimacies are implicated, as we demonstrate in the next section.

Trust, then, in this ethnographic project became not only a conceptual category through which we sought to understand the multicultural relationships between people and place but emerged within our method for engaging with participants and the places they shaped. The example discussed in the next section both gives a sense of this approach and the insights it can produce and introduces the ways in which relations of trust became embedded in both life in the net zero precinct and in the research process.

Eating in trust for net zero

Creating and working with empathetic connections, constituted through engagement with the sensory, embodied, and affective experiences of participants, have been demonstrated to underpin the generation of ethnographic knowing (Pink et al. 2017). Such engagements and encounters with other people’s experiences enable us to understand possibilities for pathways to net zero through food because they demonstrate how and where multicultural food preparation and eating practices are still framed by colonial narratives and where they are successfully contesting and moving beyond these narratives into circumstances of trust. These ethnographic findings also, we discuss further later, also have implications for the kinds of interventions that might sustain future decolonizing pathways to net zero.

For instance, when Emma met student Olivia, they talked about how Olivia grew up in a mixed-heritage family, her father worked as a chef then transitioned into (perceived) steady employment as a manager at Harvey Norman. His love of cooking Sri Lankan food is fulfilled instead in the family home. Olivia often brings leftover curries and roti to campus – reheating it in the campus microwave. This moment of connection between Emma and Olivia, as daughters of mixed families, was pivotal to how Emma was able to learn and know ethnographically. Both experience the not-quite-enoughness of this identity, for example not liking hot curries but liking roti and being short on one side of the family and too tall on the other. Olivia is completing a double degree and often studies late on campus, when she does on Mondays, she will venture up to the campus center for ‘free-food Mondays hosted in Wholefoods (an initiative we comment further on below).

Sitting on a sunny bench in the campus community garden, situated in the center of the campus, Emma asked another participant, Persie, to reflect on how and why he first got interested and involved in the Campus Community Garden. The sunshine gently filtered through the tall trees surrounding the boundaries of the garden as he told her that he had moved to Australia to study science at Monash University, leaving behind his family and friends in Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam). While he was following his passion to study science, he found it hard to establish friendships in a new country, so he joined the Campus Community Gardens. Since lockdown restrictions had lifted, the garden had yet to return to its former state of vibrance and abundance. As they walked amongst the garden beds that were overflowing with weeds, Emma tried to imagine how the gardens used to look when Persie would visit on Mondays to work with his friends – pulling weeds, watering plants and picking the produce to be cooked in the Wholefoods kitchens.

Persie found the recipes to be a bit simple; however, what these recipes did well, he explained, was to highlight the produce. Cooking is very important to Persie, it is one of the ways he connects with his family and culture. He follows a weekly routine for making his family’s recipes, each Saturday he goes to the local farmer market to buy fresh ingredients and cooks enough food for the whole week. He told Emma that his weekly routine saves him money since eating on campus is expensive. However, he admitted that he deviates from tradition by microwaving his food, back home in Vietnam his parents made everything fresh and to what sees as a “higher standard.”

After they had walked through the garden Persie took Emma to the Campus Centre student kitchen to heat up one of these home-cooked meals. It was here that Emma began to learn how the colonizing narratives that Sultana (2022a) associates with climate change, and that are still evident in top down “social licence” approaches to transition, can also be part of the experiential and perceptual worlds of some international students. As Persie explained it, “my food has lots of smells and flavors and it’s very delicious,” and they left the kitchen once his food was heated up and settled on the grass outside to eat.

Emma noticed that Persie was eating his sweet and sour pork with his hands and as he ate she reflected on her own experiences eating curry with her hands revealing that she had experienced several less than pleasant encounters around eating with her hands in staff kitchens. Persie disclosed that he had encountered similar reactions to both his food and eating with his hands:

I do feel the same way, so I tend to do that [I will tell people]: “I’m going to just be five minutes to have my lunch.” It depends on who my friends are as well, because I have a friend who are international and they are completely fine with the food that I bring. But I am aware that when I’m with my Caucasian friend, that’s just a polite thing for me to do, since I’m the only one in the group … It’s interesting to hear you bring it up. I find that I would – I used to do that, but these days I feel like I would just eventually brought up the conversations about how we eat. Especially that I gain a lot of trust in that friend group, so I would bring it up like if it was like a group of strangers then I would definitely leave.

By inviting Persie to take her to the sites (see Figure 1) where he cooked and ate and to lead with his own practices of gardening, cooking, and eating, Emma enabled him to create the place they shared in the ethnographic research. By opening these possibilities for sharing and trust, the research process also opened up opportunities for ethnographic learning; relating to the ways in which Persie engaged with his environment to create trusted situations, in which he felt confident and where he could eat in ways comfortable and familiar to him. These trusted situations were relevant to our interest in routes toward net zero carbon emissions; they showed us how locally community garden grown foods, energy for cooking and food preparation, and particular socialities and environments supported practices worked toward sustainability within the precinct.

Figure 1. Persie eating his sweet and sour pork on the grass.

Here, we can see trust coming about in two ways. First, Persie creates situations of trust, where he can eat confidently, he can feel comfortable and sure that he will not be challenged. Second, Persie and Emma created a relationship of trust, where they built on common experiences, and shared sensory and affective feelings relating to the embodied experience of eating with their hands (even though from different cultural traditions) and the sociality of eating with their hands (even though in differently composed staff or student kitchens or eating spaces). Their respective experiences were not unique, but common in existing narratives. They highlighted where more work needs to be done to create trusted social worlds where multicultural cooking and eating practices can collectively work toward net zero trajectories.

One example where such possibilities are becoming visible is in Wholefoods, mentioned above. Established in 1977, Wholefoods is a not-for-profit, student-run, vegetarian cafe located on campus at Monash University, Clayton. Emma met with Vlad, a long-time volunteer and current staff member at Wholefoods. Self-described as a part of the “old guard” doing his best to hand over the reins to the next generation of students coming into the cafe. The Wholefoods volunteers in the kitchen scrubbed dishes in the background, the sound of dishes dropping into soapy water echoed as Emma and Vlad spoke, others whisked around wiping down the long cafeteria-style tables. They were briefly interrupted by a Sikh student who had arrived to set up for free-food Mondays. Free-food Mondays are a recurring event at Wholefoods each Monday evening starting at 6pm:

“We’ve [got] ‘free food Mondays’ happening at Wholefoods right now, actually, and that’s why our dahl and rice is never going to be above $3.00, because it’s affordable, it’s full of protein and people love it.” (Vlad)

The cheap yet tasty dinners provided on Mondays are enjoyed by students like Olivia, who have classes that finish late, which means eating dinner on campus is convenient as it saves on both time and money. For other students who struggle with food security (Shi et al. 2020), free-food Mondays are more than simply convenient, they are a necessity. They are also incredibly popular events for students to attend as evidenced by the line of people waiting that extended around the long cafeteria tables and all the way out the door. The free food Mondays initiative paired closely with the ethos of Wholefoods, both working toward ensuring that students have access to tasty and nutritious food.

To learn more and experience the ethos of the Wholefoods cafe and community first hand, Vlad invited Emma to attend a volunteer meeting. At the start of this meeting, there were a number of students who were still wrapping up for the day in the kitchen, washing up dishes in the back, clearing out the baked goods cabinet. One student brought over a pile of leftover baked goods that had not been sold, including a large pile of semi-burnt vegan brownies. Emma politely took one of the less-charcoal looking pieces and began to chew, the taste of bitterness over-taking the chocolate flavor almost completely. The taste of not being wasteful. “Let’s not waste anything” the student explained, “anything we don’t eat during the meeting please take it home!” This everyday practice is symbolic of the broader Wholefoods ethos – “food for people, not for profit.” Anti-capitalism permeates the cafe space and community, emerging in their mission to reduce food waste, provide affordable vegetarian and vegan food and a space for people to learn new skills like cooking.

We can see trust emerging in and through this space in several ways. First, Emma’s invitation to the meeting represents a level of trust in her relationship with Vlad. The meeting itself provided a situation where trust could emerge, which was embodied in the commensal act of sharing food. Second, the taste of not being wasteful – burnt brownies – created a sensory exchange and set of circumstances for trust to emerge, between the volunteers who are putting the Wholefoods ethos into praxis and for Emma to demonstrate her active interest and participation. Third, the inclusion of multicultural food creates the circumstances for trust to emerge for students – especially international students. In the next section, we draw on our ethnographic materials further to outline how multicultural food and eating practices are implicated in the net zero precinct.

Healing colonial histories with love and trust

At the beginning of her book Intimate Eating: Racialized Spaces and Radical Futures, Mannur describes Bhaumik’s exhibition titled The Curry Institute⁴ and the challenge the artist faced regarding her “smelly” installation. Her art refused to stay in place, instead it created “unexpected adjacencies and intimacies” wafting where it wanted to (Mannur 2022, 3). Curry itself, Ruthnum (2017, 11) provocatively states, is not real, it is an “Indian fairy tale composed by cooks, Indians, émigrés, colonists, eaters, readers, and writers.” Eating rituals form a key element of a national identity, in Anderson’s (2005) sense of the imagined community. Anthropologist Ghassan Hage (2000) describes the collusion between discourses of white multiculturalism and white racism, which work in their own way to contain difference, thus mystifying and keeping “out of public discourse other multicultural realities in which White people are not the overwhelming occupiers of the centre of national space.” Eating some foods (but not others like chips, sandwiches or a sausage sizzle) with one’s hands, both collide with the imagined Australian identity, and as such with the Australian national vision of multiculturalism.

These misalignments between multiculturalism as “living with difference” and multiculturalism as national identity are important to attend to, because when they translate into everyday experiences and practices, they reveal how and where trust actually comes about. This in turn explains why Persie feels like he needs to leave to eat with hands around his Caucasian friends. Mannur (2022) argues that every act of eating, whether you are alone or with others, is a form of intimacy. Intimacy leaves people open and vulnerable to others, and in this sense is closely connected to trust, which comes about in situations where people feel that they can safely be vulnerable. Anthropologist Nadia Seremetakis (1994, 37) defines commensality as the “exchange of sensory memories and emotions, and of substances and objects incarnating remembrance and feeling.” Persie’s decision to trust Emma and eat his meal in front of her is a phenomenon that occurs between South Asian bodies where people try to find connection across their diasporas through their respective “weird” and smelly food, attempting to create what Chakraborty (2018) calls “a kind of subcontinental solidarity of brown bodies” or “convivial local cultures” (Gilroy 2004).

It has been 20 years since the publication of Paul Gilroy’s seminal book After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (2004) wherein Gilroy develops his conceptualization of conviviality, which broadly refers to people’s capacity to be at ease with difference. Since the release of this book there has been “convivial turn” in social science literature, largely focused on urban and critical race studies that uses the conviviality as a lens through to critique “multiculturalism” and (post)colonialisms to demonstrate how multicultural exchanges make up the ordinary and messy parts of everyday life (see Back and Sinha 2016; Ohnmacht & Yıldız 2021; and Singh 2023).

We use convivial culture in our article to describe the ways immigrants overcome a sense of loss or uncertainty by dislocation, where “traditional boundaries are disrupted and communal bonding, irrespective of race and nationality, is encouraged in this place” (Jain 2016, 108). We argue that this is what occurred between Persie and Emma, the creation of a convivial local culture or a “radical form of togetherness” (Singh 2023, 2). Emerging research on convivial cultures in the context of critiques of multiculturalism in Australia (Dekker and Haw 2023; Wise and Velayutham 2014) shows that despite claims that multiculturalism has failed, intercultural conviviality has existed and continues to thrive. Research conducted by Dekker and Haw (2023), for example, shows that “with increased streams of refugees and migrants – many of whom are experiencing complex trauma as a result of their displacement – creating a sense of trust (both intra and interculturally) needs to be made priority in terms of policy. Climate change has already created a new category of “climate refugees” (Rosignoli 2022) and with forced migration predicted to increase (Bellizzi et al. 2023), it is critical that current and future net zero policies center multiculturalism and trust, and avoid treating it as an afterthought.

There has been significant South-East Asian student migration to Australian cities over the years. In 2021, Vietnam was the fifth largest source of international students in Australia (Australian Trade and Investment Commission). A study released by the Mitchell Institute mapped the proportion of international students in different Australian suburbs, revealing that they make up over 30% of the Clayton suburb (Hurley 2020). International students, also referred to as student migrants (Pink and Postill 2017), face a number of challenges when migrating to study relating to feelings of loneliness. Some students use social media networks to combat feelings of isolation and loneliness (Gomes et al. 2014). Others focus on students cooking traditional dishes to soothe homesickness and connect with their cultural identity (Shi et al. 2020). One study found that student migrants were willing to go greater lengths to prepare recipes from their home country due to the limited availability of cultural and/or healthy meals on campus (Shi et al. 2020). What is missing from many studies about the eating habits of international students is whom they are eating with and how they are eating. That is to say, who do they feel comfortable enough to eat with? What are the eating practices they use outside of “Western” utensils, such as using one’s hands?

Persie’s example surfaces some insights in this respect, he discussed how he will leave a group of people to eat his food alone – especially if they are “Cauasian friends” because it’s the “polite” thing for him to do. His politeness stems from a level of self-consciousness about two things; the type of food he is eating and its smell, and secondly, how he is eating – with his hands. His decision to extricate himself and eat alone can be understood through the lens of what Mannur (2022, 5) calls an “intimate eating public.” Mannur explains that this entails “a vexed and contested space that is hybrid and evolving.” In this space, the public and the intimate become entangled since, “every act of eating with others, or alone, is a form of intimacy. And yet each gesture of eating is laced with multiple meanings that acquire differential public meanings.” Mannur identifies three key elements upon which eating is contingent: “socioeconomic status, race, and gender.” And identifies the questions of “Whom we eat with, how we eat, and how these rituals are imagined.”

To understand the intimate eating public experience by Persie, we focus on one of these contingencies – race. Race, “is not merely a problem of visuality but one that stems from bodily inscriptions of otherness” (Elam et al. as cited in Mannur 2022, 3). In the ethnographic example above, we learn about Persie’s rituals of eating, both alone and with others. Persie was reflexive about his decisions about who he eats with and how he eats, reflecting on two key bodily inscriptions of otherness involved in his eating rituals: the types of food he brings to eat and eating with his hands. Many South-East Asian children’s first experience of eating food is being fed by their mothers hands. Children rely on their parents, they need to trust their parents, Govier (1992) points out that even philosopher Thomas Hobbes must have trusted his mother. Children’s first eating habits are often learned in the everyday setting of the home, what Mauss (1973) called “techniques of the body,” whether or not they involve eating with one’s hands or a knife and fork. These processes of learning and knowing are sensorial, and it is through sensory and social encounters with foods that children come to know, and feel familiar and comfortable in – that is, they learn to trust – certain sensations and circumstances.

Persie’s sensory engagements with food can be compared with what Turna (2016) describes as the distance “Westerners” put between themselves and their food. Turna (2016) sees this distance as both physical and ontological, whereby the fork is not only a bodily technique but part of their socialized identity to express disgust at the idea of touching food with one’s hands, resonating with sociologist Norbert Elias’ notion of the “civilising process” The whereby the “fork ritual” he argues, is “nothing other than the embodiment of a specific standard of emotions and a specific level of revulsion” (Elias 1978, 107). However, these are not simply matters of multicultural difference since, a core component of this “civilising process” circles back to the idea that colonized subjects are dirty, therefore framed as Other (McClintock 2013). When translated to the experiences of overseas students of eating in the Net Zero Precinct, this framing invites new insights into how and where and with whom shared sensory intimacies of eating together in trusted situations might come about. As Persie’s example shows, these vestiges of colonial histories persist in ways that are often made invisible in public, on the initiative of overseas students themselves. When we remind ourselves of the entanglements of climate change and colonialism, the need to generate a multicultural space through which routes to net zero can be thought out is essential. Importantly, it opens up the question of how to engender shared spaces of trusted commensality, newly characterized by the visibility of multicultural and sustainable cooking and eating.

The case of the Wholefoods Cafe starts to answer this question as we envisage students from different cultures sharing a free South Asian meal cooked by volunteers. How do we reconcile this sensory commensality of sharing a sustainable meal, with the caution that overseas students feel about the sensoriality of their own cultural foods, and their practices of eating with their hands? Or perhaps more importantly, how can collective food sharing be not just sustainable but decolonized? To achieve this would be a key step toward net zero because it would seek to eradicate the colonial relations that are so inseparable from climate change from food-based pathways toward net zero.

Conclusion

The net zero precinct is taking place in a larger global context of capitalist and colonialist processes. Our research seeks to create and apply new knowledge to this context, through a series of interventions toward new realistic, viable, ethical, and inclusive pathways to net zero. In the Australian context, the wider colonizing legacy and relations of both multicultural living and of science and academic traditions (Costa Marques 2021) were evident in our study. Our argument is both for a shift in the way we think and apply practical interventions toward net zero carbon emissions, from the ground up, rather than from academe down. This means sensory attention to the relationships and circumstances of multicultural trust that already exist and further consideration of how trusted futures might come about.

In this article, we have taken the key first steps required. We have argued that trust is a valuable concept to use when carving new pathways to net zero carbon emissions, particularly in processes whereby decolonization and decarbonization become interwoven trajectories. Although net zero technologies will be used and incorporated into social life are not predetermined, the visions and possibilities they offer are instrumental in shaping the future trajectories. This is why we need to be constantly reminded of the entanglements of climate change and colonialism. Trust has implications for both social continuity and change. Thinking through net zero futures with trust allows new possibilities. We argue that this could be done by making multicultural and sustainable cooking and eating visible, which will allow shared spaces of trusted commensality to emerge. More work needs to be done in this space, especially when it comes to creating trusted social worlds where multicultural cooking and eating practices can collectively work toward net zero trajectories.

Our future work involves seeking to move forward through envisioning ethnographically informed and ethical futures, through experimentation, and immersion in the sites of possible pathways to net zero, through sensorial engagements with and alongside participants in research.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the people who participated in this study for their generosity in giving their time and enthusiasm to our research. Their incredible openness and passion made this work possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The research was funded by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council’s Linkage Projects funding Scheme [‘Net Zero Precincts: an interdisciplinary approach to decarbonising cities’ project number: LP200100296] in partnership with Monash University and Engie.

Notes on contributors

Emma Quilty

Emma Quilty is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Emerging Technologies Lab at Monash University. Emma Quilty’s work is situated at the intersection of anthropology and the field of feminist science and technology studies, focused on the gendered and racialised aspects of technology design, development and deployment. She has researched and published on topics including: trustworthy AI, digital methods and feminist sub-cultures. She is currently working as a research fellow for the Net Zero Precincts project, funded by the Australian Research Council.

Sarah Pink

Sarah Pink (PhD, FASSA, PhD h.c., PhD h.c) is a design and futures anthropologist and documentary filmmaker. She is an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow, and Professor and Director of the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University Australia. Her current projects include her role as Chief Investigator on the Net Zero Precincts project, funded by the Australian Research Council. Her most recent publications include her book Emerging Technologies/Life at the Edge of the Future and her documentary Digital Energy Futures.

Notes

1. Department of Industry, Science and Resources (2021) Media Release: Australia’s plan to reach our net zero target by 2050. Available at: https://www.minister.industry.gov.au/ministers/taylor/media-releases/australias-plan-reach-our-net-zero-target-2050 Accessed 15 Dec 2022

2. Ethics approval for this project granted by the Monash University Human Research Ethics Committee, approval number: 27723.

3. Phillippa Carisbrooke (2016) Exploring Clayton, Australia’s most diverse suburb. SBS. Available here: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/exploring-clayton-australias-most-diverse-suburb/tn83kkfdv Accessed: 28 Nov 2022

4. The Curry Institute by Sita Bhaumik http://www.sitabhaumik.com/the-curry-institute. Accessed: 1 Dec 2022