food

Sustainable Lives: Consumption as Politics and Lifestyle

The Sustainable Lives Project is a multidisciplinary project that investigates the drivers of consumption choices, i.e. food choices, and the impact of changing discourses, norms and attitudes around food on actual patterns of food consumption. We ask: What drives food choices and how are they influenced by ideas and discourses related to more sustainable lifestyles?

The project assembles a rich and diverse set of pilot experiments to examine how society engages with food through the lens of sustainability. These explorations are spread across the fields of communication studies, linguistics, social geography, sociology and economics, with project partners within and outside the university in these areas. You can find an overview of all researchers working on the project and all external partners on the Center for a Sustainable University website.

We adopt a comprehensive interdisciplinary approach that looks at both, discourses about food and the everyday practices of food consumption. Researchers in the WISO lab analyze local, international, youth and online media outlets and conduct surveys and experiments.

Project directors: Michael Brüggemann (speaker), Jannis Androutsopoulos, Imke Hoppe, Katharina Kleinen-von Königslöw, Stefanie Kley, Grischa Perino and Anke Strüver

Project coordinator: Fenja De Silva-Schmidt (Radhika Mittal from March 2018 to September 2019)