The Participatory Food Systems group (PFS) brings together the research interests, backgrounds, and practices of independent researchers, early career scholars and activists, and community organisers interested in exploring the intersections between politics, justice, food, space, art, and participation, among others.
The group’s ultimate aim is to democratise knowledge and the critical exploration of issues such as colonialism, food sovereignty, and urbanism by generating ways for different groups, from members of urban poor communities to chronically online autodidacts and may others, to access knowledge that would otherwise be relegated to the gilded heights of academia.
Participatory Food Systems Dialogues
These dialogues kick off PFS’ activities by providing a space for its members to share and discuss their research interests, and co-explore with each other and with members of their own, each other’s and Look Who is Talking’s networks. This sharing takes the form of a series of recorded dialogues initiated and facilitated by members of PFS, who speak about or present on their advocacies and research interests. In the interest of learning publicly, interaction was highly encouraged, and continuing engagement is welcomed.
Huiying Ng works through research, art and advocacy to develop an iterative practice of knowledge gathering and transmission. Her practice includes writing, action research and multimodal interventions towards agroecological futures. From 2020-2024, she is based at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany, as a doctoral researcher on the Volkswagen Foundation’s Freigeist project Environing Infrastructures. Huiying has presented a mixture of individual and collective work on commons and food in the Netherlands, Canada, Singapore, Bangkok, and her work has appeared in Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s (Germany) Technosphere magazine, and the exhibition IN THE FOREST, EVEN THE AIR BREATHES curated by Abhijan Toto for the GAMeC in Bergamo, Italy. In shared collaborative practice, since 2019, she has been developing the city-wide Soil Regeneration Project, a community-led action research process, and has been part of several Singapore-based groups (Foodscape Collective, TANAH, and soft/WALL/studs) since 2015.
Christina Mirasol Sayson has an MA in Anthropology from the University of the Philippines. She believes that the conditions facilitating our imminent global and civilizational collapse are deeply intertwined. She is trying to figure out how she can help humanity survive and thrive in and through the end of the world as we know it.
Ezekiel Sales (a.k.a. Zeke) is an activist and cultural worker, and he is currently taking his bachelor’s in Geography at the University of the Philippines. His research interests include philosophy, urban studies, and anthropology. He is also a member of The Forest Curriculum, a mobile platform for interdisciplinary research and mutual co-learning based in South and Southeast Asia and operating internationally.
Boonanan Natakun (a.k.a. Pan) is a full-time lecturer at the Faculty of Architecture and Planning and a vice-director of the Urban Futures and Policies research unit at Thammasat University, Thailand. As an urban researcher, he has been involved in community development research and practices, looking at how the livelihood of the urban poor could be sustained and improved during social and climate-change uncertainty in Southeast Asian cities. He is also interested in on-ground practices in socio-cultural dimensions of urban neighbourhoods, considering them as both community assets and tactics to tackle housing security and gentrification processes leading to inevitable transformations of urban habitats and inhabitants alike.
Gatari Surya Kusuma is a researcher, writer and curator based in Yogyakarta. After graduating from the Department of Photography at the Indonesian Institute of the Art in 2016, she conducted action research and deepened her critical pedagogy with her group, KUNCI Study Forum & Collective. She also conducts artistic productions and ethnographic research related to food with a food study collective called the Bakudapan Food Study Group. Currently, she is currently handling a number of curation projects, including co-curating Struggles for Sovereignty, a platform for socio-ecological justice, and Parallel Walking, a walking project to articulate the experience of sensing the city as a living space. She also has a 2021 Taiwan Art Space Alliance online residency and was a fellow for Bak Basis Voor Actuele Kunst Fellowship for Situated Practice from 2021 to 2022.
Napong Tao Rugkhapan is an assistant professor of urban planning at the School of Global Studies at Thammasat University, Thailand. He received a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Michigan. His research interests include critical cartography, critical heritage studies, and technopolitics of urban design planning.
Pujita Guha is a curator, artist, and scholar. She is a Ph.D. student and Chancellor’s Fellow at the Film and Media Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. She also runs the artistic and interdisciplinary research platform, Forest Curriculum, along with Abhijan Toto. Her curatorial, creative, and academic interests include thinking about forests & frontiers, cinema and media, infrastructures, and south & southeast Asia. She has published in Cineaste, NANG, IIC Quarterly, Art Critique of Taiwan, and South Asian History and Culture, among others. Her work has been supported by the Bikuben Foundation, Sharjah Experimental Publication Grant, Arts Network Asia, and Australian Council, amongst others.