Dr. Katharina Graf

Since 2021 Katharina Graf is a research fellow at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology at Goethe University Frankfurt. As Principal Investigator of a new ethnographic research project, titled Digital Disconnections (DigiD): Food, Poverty and Digital Inequality in Germany, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), she explores the manifestation, experience and management of multiple and intersecting digital disconnections in domestic contexts with respect to cooking and eating in Germany. This research will contribute towards a better understanding of the lived experience and structural dimensions of food poverty and digital inequality in welfare states and of their implications for socio-digital participation more broadly. DigiD follows from a previous research project, titled Cyborg Cook, also funded by the DFG, which investigated the everyday cooking practices of domestic households across Western Germany. This research provides a better understanding of the reproduction of knowledge in the context of digitalisation, the relationship between humans and machines and how these intersect with negotiations of gender, ethnicity and class. In 2025 Katharina also co-founded the international Digital Foodscapes Network. 

Previously, Katharina Graf was a postdoctoral research fellow and principal investigator at the SOAS Food Studies Centre, University of London, where she carried out a research project on The Price of Bread as a Measure of Urban Stability, funded by the AXA Research Fund. Through ethnographic research she explored the linkages between governmental policies to ensure food security and everyday food practices in the context of political instability. She followed bread along the food chain, from urban consumers as bread makers via the distribution and processing of wheat, back to its production in the agricultural hinterlands of Marrakech and Beni Mellal, and found that especially homemade bread is key not only to everyday food security but also to political stability in Morocco and the region.

In 2016 Katharina Graf finished her PhD dissertation, titled Food in the Making, at SOAS University of London and supported by the Stiftung der Deutschen Wirtschaft (sdw). Based on twelve months of fieldwork in Marrakech, during which she learned to prepare food alongside three domestic cooks and their families, she investigated the interrelations between material and social change and cooking knowledge. She found that despite new kitchen technologies and women's emancipation, which alter food work and the domestic division of labour, the knowledgeable preparation of food remains a key factor in the (re)production of everyday family life.

Before joining SOAS University of London in 2010 as a graduate student in the MA Social Anthropology programme, Katharina Graf obtained a Diplom (equivalent to an MSc degree) in Geography at the universities of Tübingen, Bonn and Cologne with a thesis titled Drinking Water Supply in the Middle Drâa Valley. As part of the interdisciplinary GLOWA/Impetus project of the universities of Bonn and Cologne, she studied the drinking water supply in two communities in rural southern Morocco through hydrological and ethnographic research and found that local options for action had to adjust to increasing water scarcity and growing institutional constraints.

Between 2014 and 2018 Katharina Graf also taught and supervised undergraduate and postgraduate students at SOAS University of London and, since 2020, at Goethe University Frankfurt. She is furthermore associate book reviews editor for the FoodAnthropology Blog of the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition (SAFN), American Anthropological Association, and a member of various academic associations such as the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA), where she co-convened the Anthropology of Food Network between 2017 and 2018.

Books

2025. Food Beyond Terroir: Tasting Place and Placing Taste in Global Perspective, co-edited with A. Colquhoun. New York: Berghahn. Open Access: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/ColquhounFood

2024a. Food and Families in the Making: Knowledge Reproduction and Political Economy of Cooking in Morocco. New York: Berghahn. Open Access (introduction, chapter 2): https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/GrafFood

Refereed articles

[under review] Site/ing Smart Homes: Control and Care in Everyday Life, co-authored with D. Eckhardt. Housing, Theory and Society.

[manuscript] Participant Perception: A Sensory Approach to Studying Everyday Digital Practices. New Media and Society.

2025a. Cooking and Technology. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Food Studies. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780197762530.013.178

2024b. Cooking with(out) Others? Changing Kitchen Technologies and Family Values in Marrakech. J of North African Studies 29(4): 575-600. Open Access: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13629387.2022.2056448

2023. Cyborg Cooks: Mothers and the Anthropology of Smart Kitchens. Digital Culture and Society 23(1): 49-70. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.14361/dcs-2023-0104/html

2022. Taste Knowledge: Couscous and the Cook's Six Senses, J of the Royal Anthropological Institute 28(2): 577-594. Open Access: https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-9655.13708

2020. Introduction: From Nature to Culture? Claude Lévi-Strauss' Legacy and the Study of Contemporary Foodways, co-authored with E. Mescoli. Food, Culture and Society 23(4): 465-471. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15528014.2020.1773692

2019a. The Price of Homemade Bread, Gastronomica 19(1): 107-108. https://online.ucpress.edu/gastronomica/article-abstract/19/1/107/2007/The-Price-of- Homemade-Bread?redirectedFrom=fulltext

2019b. Re-examining the Contested Good: Proceedings from a Postgraduate Workshop on Good Food, co-authored with A. Cohen, B. Simpson-Miller and F. Vaghi. Gastronomica 19(1): 91-93. https://online.ucpress.edu/gastronomica/article- abstract/19/1/91/2020/Re-examining-the-Contested-Good-Proceedings-from- a?redirectedFrom=fulltext

2018. Cereal Citizens: Crafting Bread and Belonging in Urbanising Morocco, Paideuma: Mitteilungen zur Kulturkunde 64: 244-277. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26589141

Book chapters

2025. Introduction, with A. Colquhoun and H.G. West. In Food Beyond Terroir: Tasting Place and Placing Taste in Global Perspective, ed. A. Colquhoun and K. Graf. New York: Berghahn, pp. 1-26. Open Access: see Books

2025b. Domestic Cooks' Work toward Moroccan Beldi Foods in Uncertain Times. In Food Beyond Terroir: Tasting Place and Placing Taste in Global Perspective, ed. A. Colquhoun and K. Graf. New York: Berghahn, pp. 173-188. Open Access: see Books

2015. Beldi Matters: Negotiating Proper Food in Urban Moroccan Food Consumption and Preparation. In Halal Matters: Islam, Politics and Markets in Global Perspective, F. Bergeaud- Blackler, J. Fischer and J. Lever (eds). London: Routledge, pp. 72-90. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315746128-5/beldi-matters- negotiating-proper-food-urban-moroccan-food-consumption-preparation-katharina-graf

Book reviews

2023. 'States of Subsistence: The Politics of Bread in Contemporary Jordan' by José Ciro Martinez, Gastronomica Vol. 23(3).

2018. 'Making Modern Meals: How Americans Cook Today' by Amy B. Trubek, SAFN Blog, 22^nd October. https://foodanthro.com/2018/10/22/review-making-modern-meals/

2016. 'Nurturing Masculinities: Men, Food and Family in Contemporary Egypt' by Nefissa Naguib, SAFN Blog, 28^th September. https://foodanthro.com/2016/09/28/review-and-interview- nurturing-masculinities/

2015. 'Secrets from the Greek Kitchen: Cooking, Skill and Everyday Life on an Aegean Island' by David E. Sutton, Gastronomica Vol. 15(4): 97-98.

Other

2025. Digital Foodscapes: Past – Present – Future. Position paper (preprint). Co-authored with Allgaier, J.; Bartelmeß, T.; M. Cardel; Decorte, P.; Evans, R.; Feldman, Z.; Fernandez, M.; Forno, F.; Grosglik, R.; Han, D.I.D.; Huey, S.L.; König, L.M.; Leer, J.; Lewis, T.; Munk, A.K.; Onorati, M.G.; Parasecoli, F.; Partridge, S.R.; Podszun, M.C.; Rüdiger, S.; Schneider, T.; Sproesser, G.; Wirsam, J.; Zoet, M. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/pzmu5_v1

2017. Hausgemacht! Die anhaltende Bedeutung häuslicher Nahrungszubereitung, In 'Ausgekocht?!', museum catalogue, Frauen in der Einen Welt, pp. 128-132.

2010. Drinking Water Supply in the Middle Drâa Valley, South Morocco: Options for Action in the Context of Water Scarcity and Institutional Constraints. Kölner Ethnologische Beiträge 34. Open Access: https://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/4171/