Amalie Scheel (she/her) is a PhD fellow at the Department of Digital Design and Information Studies at Aarhus University. Amalie is interested in the cultural embeddedness and affective qualities of food. Methodologically, Amalie primarily works ethnographically and is particularly interested in how creative and experimental methods can support and unpack ethnographic understandings.
Amalie is affiliated with the FOCUS Centre for Food Culture Studies, the DATALAB research group, and the STS Centre Aarhus.
In her PhD project, Amalie is studying meat as a culturally constructed, changing, and contested object. The study is geographically situated in a Danish context and temporally in the contemporary time where meat and its role in Danish food culture is highly disputed due to its relation to CO2 emission, animal welfare, the agricultural sector, and, not least, personal politics. In the project, Amalie is particularly interested in the latter and how cultural emotions play important roles in forming these politics.
To study this empirically, the project deploys a combination of various ethnographic methods, including digital ethnography of meat discussions, collage-making workshops with participants, and ethnographic poetry.
The project is in conversation with the fields of cultural studies of food, STS (science and technology studies), and social media studies. With the project, Amalie wishes to unpack how how meat as a simultanously mundane and controversial object is culturally negotiated, and how meat relates to concepts of affect, belonging, and identity.
