Nick Piper

PhD Student CONANX Project

Address: 4th Floor, ICoSS Building
Telephone (Internal): 26063
Telephone (UK): 0114 222 6063
Telephone (International): +44 114 222 6063
Email: ggp09nep@sheffield.ac.uk

Research Interests

• Cultural geography
• Food and Drink
• Media
• Material culture

Current Research

My current project focuses on the varying ways in which consumers engage with different aspects of popular food media. Broadly speaking this incorporates an interest in consumer reactions to moralising discourses of food consumption, celebrity chef culture and the use values attributed to food media, both as a form of entertainment and as manifested through a range of changing culinary practices in domestic and public spaces.

I am interested in the relationship between mediatised geographical imaginaries of place presented through visual food media and their potential divergences and confluences with the lived `everyday´ experiences of a diverse set consumers who are potentially mobile across a range of different scales and contexts of practice, both culinary and otherwise.

Currently this translates as an interest in how people make sense of popular food media in terms of their identities, everyday habits and food routines. It is also marked by an interest in the extent to which food media (particularly media which has both didactic health messages and cookery advice) is implicated in the formation and sustenance of anxieties about individual and group consumption practices.

The research is funded by the European Research Council as part of a wider project on `Consumer culture in an age of anxiety´ (CONANX). [http://www.shef.ac.uk/conanx/].

Previous Research

MA thesis (Newcastle University, 2007) "What´s the matter lager boy, afraid you might taste something?": Geographies of identity, representation and economic knowledge in the world of Real Ale.