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The philosophy of "Bread and Altars"
We all eat!
We eat not just for nutrition or because food tastes good.
We also "eat" where we live, the histories we’ve inherited, the future we imagine, our socioeconomic class, our ethnicity, our religion, and our culture.
What kinds of food do you eat or not eat?
What spoken and unspoken expectations shape how you eat?
Who do you eat with or not eat with?
Which foods are "taboo," "special" and "everyday"?
How is food part of your rituals and celebrations?
How does the food we eat make us "human"?
Bread and Altars, Braiding Life and Death explores these questions--and more!--by centering bread as a material and symbol of nourishment that sustains us physically, socially, and spiritually.
For Bread and Altars, bread is a bridge.
We center bread to consider how being human is about being connected, being in relationship:
Bread connects us with people. The word "companion" has roots in the words "bread" and "with," highlighting bread's centrality in forming relationships.
Bread connects us with the microscopic parts of our world. Yeast and microbes give bread its loft, so through the processes of making and eating bread, we are entangled with these forms of life.
Bread connects us with our ancestors and people not physically present, sustaining our relationships with those who are no longer here but we hold in our memories.
Event Organizers
Agatha Beins (she/they) teaches in the Multicultural Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Texas Woman’s University and is editor of the online open-access journal Films for the Feminist Classroom. Her book, Liberation in Print: Feminist Periodicals and Social Movement Identity looks at how periodicals published within the US women's liberation movement helped shape feminism as a collective identity and set of political practices in the 1970s. In addition to social movement organizing, her interests include the intersections of art and activism, feminist pedagogies, archival research methods, and food justice. You can often find her bicycling around Denton, listening to podcasts, and seeking out artspaces that spark the imagination.
Stina Soderling is a scholar of rural queer studies and anarcha-feminist pedagogies. Her research centers on questions of queer/feminist community building under late capitalism. She holds a Ph.D. in Women's and Gender Studies from Rutgers University, and is Assistant Professor in Multicultural Women's and Gender Studies at Texas Woman's University. Her microbial research is based in the queer rural US South, where she has observantly participated in fermenting substances ranging from food to compost to shit. Stina is particularly interested in how human interactions with microbes shape temporality: slowing down, speeding up, or morphing time. When she is not working, she still loves hanging out with microbes, and has most recently, after many years of trying, fallen in love with kvass.
Denise Meda-Lambru (she/her/ella) is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Texas Department of Philosophy and Religion. Her scholarship builds with Latin American philosophy and Latina/x feminisms. Her current book project takes an interdisciplinary approach to study Day of the Dead/Día de los Muertos altars, especially those taken up by marginalized communities to theorize aesthetic, political, spiritual, and ethical expressions of death.
Denise has essays published in The Pluralist, The Journal of World Philosophies, and The Inter-American Journal of Philosophy.
Other ways Denise spends her time includes fetch and walks with her dog Bean, and playing board games with her spouse.
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