This summer course, designed by Salma Serry, explores modes of dominance, violence and reclaiming of power in historical investigations of food.
Over the timespan of two months, this course consists of weekly online seminars featuring a diverse lineup of guest speakers.
As an optional addition to the course, participants can join a week-long residency in Cairo, Egypt, where we will contextualize and deepen the course themes within the local environment.

Colonialism and imperialism have cast long shadows over the global present, infiltrating systems of power, culture, and survival—particularly through food and its production and knowledge. But how useful is it to continuously center colonial histories in our intellectual and creative work surrounding food, when efforts to shape better futures remain trapped in their reactive orbit? This course challenges the pervasive colonial and postcolonial frameworks that define much of our engagement with the past and present, seeking instead to imagine futures rooted in liberation and sovereignty, not reaction.

Through the prism of roots, uprootal, and rerootal in West Asia and North Africa, the course investigates how anti-colonial intellectuals, cultural workers, and contemporary activists have envisioned alternative systems of living, resisting, and creating through food. These concepts confront the violence of uprooting imposed by colonial regimes, the biopolitical management of populations through a globalized capitalist food infrastructure, and the need to reroot in ways that challenge imperialist hegemony. How can we dismantle imperialist legacies without falling into the traps of romanticization or simplistic binaries like local versus global, or rural vs urban that may themselves be discursive tools of empire.

We ask whether "indigenous" and rooted frameworks must purely reject liberal and global paradigms entirely, or whether they can embrace some kinds of syncretic practices that confront imperialist systems while fostering interconnected across scales. In examining food systems, cultural production, and artistic expression, we uncover how the global South and local marginalized communities have resisted not just colonization but the commodification of their biopolitical identities, foodways and histories.
This course positions food as sites of biopower struggle- not just artifacts of culture but battlegrounds for reclaiming agency and dismantling imperial power. Participants will explore whether thinking locally- while resisting neoliberal globalism—can offer pathways to a sovereign future. What would a truly decolonized future of food look like, and can we reclaim global interconnectedness outside the logics of imperial extraction?
Ultimately, postdecoloniality challenges us to move beyond the exhausted metaphor of decolonisation to embody a forward-looking praxis rooted in the histories of resistance, indigenous wisdom and the potential for transformative futures.

The program is primarily conducted online, featuring lectures, guest speaker presentations, and interactive discussions. Over two months, participants will attend a weekly seminar, each comprising a 60-minute lecture followed by a 30-minute Q&A session. References and reading materials are provided in advance, encouraging participants to engage with the content beforehand.

Accompanied by the program, participants are also invited to join a one-week residency in Cairo, Egypt. During this residency, we will explore various local contexts connected to the course themes through field trips, workshops, guest lectures, and in-depth discussions over shared communal meals.

Through a series of lectures and an optional residency, we will pursue interdisciplinary modes of knowledge sharing and exchange, while fostering opportunities for sustained growth and collective thinking.
We aim to create an atmosphere of trust and safety, in order to help form a tight knit community of critically engaged, curious and rooted thinkers and makers.
Coming together with multiple cultures requires sensitivity and openness.
We don’t aim to create a homogenous answers, but rather encourage debate through respectful discourse in a space of curiosity and learning.
Accountability through compassion is a shared commitment to owning our actions and embracing the possibility of change.

This week-long residency invites cultural practitioners whose work with food in adjacency to power, the environment, infrastructure, technology, knowledge, and culture.
By hosting the residency in Cairo, the program situates itself in a historically and geopolitically relevant space to critically engage with these dynamics. The city offers immersive experience on the lasting effects of European and American imperialism in the Middle East, European-African histories, and the ongoing tensions between the North and South Mediterranean.

In order to facilitate access to participants from less favorable economic backgrounds and people of colour, The Gramounce offers a limited amount of scholarships opportunities for the online course.

Scholarship results will be notified the week before the start of the course.

Salma Serry is a food history researcher, filmmaker and founding curator of  Sufra Archive , a library dedicated to the modern food history of Southwest Asia and North Africa, housing the largest collection of +600 historical Arabic cookbooks and culinary ephemera. She is an awardee of the prestigious Arab Fund for Arts and Culture/ACSS grant for her ongoing project that documents a 100 years of SWANA’s culinary ephemera. She was recently commissioned research projects by Art Jameel-Dubai, Hayy Jameel-Jeddah, and the Arab Council for Social Sciences-Beirut.
Her approach centers on contextualizing and analyzing history, archives and memory to highlight the politicization of food through forgotten, contested, or marginalized narratives that tend to disappear against hegemonizing national cuisines and identity politics. The result of her work is often an investigation - habitually in writing and occasionally in a film format- of the entanglement of food in politics and migration.

Her latest writings on food were published in Bloomsbury Handbook of Schools and Religion, Oxford Food Symposium Proceedings (in press), Arab Literature Quarterly, CNT Traveller and You Are Here: The Journal of Creative Geography. She also enjoys designing and conducting workshops that invite reflections and dialogue around the aforementioned topics, as recently commissioned by Art Jameel, Al Serkal Avenue, and the Islamic Arts Biennial.
She is part of Super Melon, a collective art project that aims to investigate the intersectionality of food and politics in occupied Palestine, bringing into view the everyday overlooked aspects of lived experience.