This Senior Capstone Project aims to serve as the physical intersection of my academic journey with food studies, cultural studies, and community-based journalism. The project itself will take the shape of a cookbook; one filled with various forms of writing\u2014including creative, journalistic, and analytical\u2014as well as original photography and a variety of beloved recipes. My research and writing are rooted in the unique entwinement of food and culture that exists and thrives within diasporic communities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Defining \u2018Diaspora\u2019; a diaspora is formed when people belonging to a cultural and\/or ethnic group are living in a place that is not their or their ancestor\u2019s country of origin.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n My journey to this Senior Capstone Project has been a long one, a path I hadn’t realized I started on until this academic year. Over the course of my four years of college, the starting point of my work can be traced back to my very first program at The Evergreen State College; Eating in Translation<\/a> Fall 2019 with Professor Sarah Williams. Linked is the catalog description for the program. As part of my work for this program, I created and executed a 4 credit in-program ILC titled The Cultural & Ancestral Links Food Brings to the Table where I researched how family recipes\u2014oral and written\u2014can preserve cultural ties and why certain foods hold so much cultural significance. This program and ILC are what piqued my interest in food studies as an academic pathway, first introducing me to critical thinking of why we eat what we eat and the question of how can we create more just and sustainable foodways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n More recently, I dove deeper into the intersection of food studies with my other academic passions of community-based journalism and cultural studies. First manifesting itself in my work at The Evergreen State College’s student newspaper the Cooper Point Journal (CPJ), where in March 2022 I began publishing a monthly column title “Feeding the Diaspora”<\/a>, I explored the personal connection I had with the entanglement of food and culture. I wrote about the foods I most vividly remembered from childhood such as kimchi jjigae and baked ziti, walking readers through the cooking process as well as the cultural background of each dish–and how that culture inhabited space in my life. In Winter 2023, I deepened this work through another ILC.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhere it Began<\/h4>\n\n\n\n