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 over-rely on colonial histories in our intellectual and creative work on food, when it risks overdetermination, singular narratives, and performative activism? How can we shape better futures with a fresh point of departure that breaks away from the reactive orbit of oppressor and oppressed? This course re-approaches the pervasive narratives of imperial history of food that define much of our engagement with the past and present, seeking instead to imagine futures rooted in inherent agency, sovereignty, and resilience, not reaction.
Through the prism of roots (up/re-rootal) in West Asia and North Africa, the course investigates how anti-colonial and indigenous intellectuals, cultural workers, and contemporary activists have envisioned alternative systems of living, enduring, 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 these 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 technology and global paradigms entirely, or whether they can embrace some kinds of syncretic practices that confront imperialist systems while fostering interconnectedness across scales. In examining food systems, cultural production, and artistic expression, we uncover how the global South and local marginalized communities have persevered in the face of 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 by deepdiving into the micro-scale of everyday life. 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, what could come after decolonization when we leave behind its metaphor to embody a forward-looking praxis premised upon rooted yet also dynamic, transformative, and ongoing indigenous wisdom?

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 doctoral researcher and cultural worker specialized in the history of food in West Asia and Egypt. She is also the curator of Sufra Archive , a digital archive project and social media platform dedicated to West Asian and North African food history and culture. She is working on a PhD in History in the University of Toronto with a specialization in Food Studies at the Culinaria Research Center. Her projects revolve broadly around reconfigurations of power on the scales of imperial structure as well as everyday life, through food politics, mobility networks, and technology in the region. Her PhD project was recently awarded the distinguished SSHRC Doctoral Award from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in Canada, while her art projects have received the Research on the Arts grant from the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC) and the Arab Council for Social Sciences (ACSS). Her research and public programming projects have been exhibited at Art Jameel (Dubai), Hayy Jameel (Jeddah), the Arab Council for Social Sciences (Beirut), the Islamic Biennial (Jeddah), and Cairo Design Week.