About the Website
The experience of the Food Assembly is informed by the intersection of the constitutive groups, who are distinct in terms of their participation. For this reason, the website is organized to be experienced through their personification drawn from people I have interacted with but anonymised. While I recognise that this order of classification is not helpful in building the much-desired community, I have purposefully reproduced it here. This approach, made possible by the digital, allows me to break the linearity of my text, for a single narrative would not have sufficed. At the same time, it allows me to map the overlapping practices between the groups producing intentional repetition, and highlighting blindness by forcing a separation.
In line with my double-layered fieldwork, each personification is dual-layered – you need to pass through the neat digital transaction interface to get to the messiness of my ethnographic notes, but before doing so, you again need to make a decision on which route to take. These routes are broader concerns of engagement for this social enterprise, which overlap in theme but diverge in content. Since the personification is my embodiment gesture, I keep myself present throughout the text as I synthesise and analyse my conversations and contextual analysis. Here and there, I allow my interviewees their own words, but without interrupting and in the context of my flow of language.
The chosen narrative structure eschews a singular, grand conclusion, but rather privileges multiple open lines of engagement with this project.