Valorising Hidden Culture: Power, Identity and Affect in Leicester Food Practices

This thesis offers a fresh perspective on mainstream cultural studies discourse, in which culture is conceived as capital, through economic valorisation, and a productionist gaze, which favours culture as produced and as product. The thesis highlights the shortcomings of such an approach, expressed as a deficit in our understanding of culture, through which everyday cultural practices are overlooked and the value of ‘high culture’ reinforced over other forms. Responding to the limitations of hegemonic models and approaches, ‘hidden culture’ is developed and presented as an alternative conceptual and analytical framework for cultural studies, and deployed in the thesis through a case study of food practices and everyday materiality. When conceived in this way, people are seen to live rich cultural lives in an everyday context, and cultural production is seen as not exclusively taking place in institutional settings, but in households, community spaces, and in social interactions and behaviours, in a way that is not captured through traditional models and approaches. Hidden culture opens up new avenues of research for cultural studies, by offering a fresh, more nuanced approach to considering cultural value; providing opportunities for a recalibrated scale of research focus which centres individual experiences and concerns, and reappreciates female-coded cultural representation. Moreover, hidden culture has significance for policy and praxis, highlighting the need to reappraise policy design focused on institutional culture, revisit evaluation approaches which emphasise tangible cultural products over cultural production and consumption, and foregrounding the imperative of recognising and valuing everyday activities as culture.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

PhD

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

De Montfort University

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Parsons, Laura

Licence

• https://dora.dmu.ac.uk/bitstreams/7768302e-d253-4d50-b0e3-836d13abf79f/download