Weekly two-hour lectures: the week's claim, the evidence behind it, and the reading that carries it. Each one sets up Wednesday's tutorial.
Lectures run Mondays 10:00–12:00 in the Cold Storage Building (7), Room 2.11, and follow the same shape each week: the claim, the evidence behind it, and the reading that carries it forward. The course builds cumulatively — each week names the argument it inherits from the one before — so week 1 sets the pattern for the rest.
Lectures are recorded, but they’re the smaller half of the course. The tutorials are where the argument meets evidence from your own kitchen — and that can’t be caught on video.
The twelve lectures fall into four modules, and reading them in order is the point:
- Weeks 1–3 · Disenchantment — cold as a manufactured commodity, from the ice trade to Freon, and the myth of modernity sold alongside it.
- Weeks 4–6 · Micropolitics — the interior as a jurisdiction, and the door as a stage.
- Weeks 7–9 · The tyranny of time — date labels, systemic waste, and the stuffed fridge as emotional solace. Where the argument becomes measurable.
- Weeks 10–12 · Resistance and reconstruction — surveillance capitalism in the kitchen, degrowth, and what could be built instead.
The birth of artificial cold: from the ice trade to Freon
How cold stopped being a season and became a purchasable commodity — and what that did to human perception of time
The totem of modernity: advertising, gender and the second shift
Technology promised to liberate the housewife. It raised the standard instead, and bound her more tightly to the kitchen.
The terminal of the global supply chain: the erasure of locality
Your fridge is the last mile of a planetary system. Chilean cherries, Norwegian salmon, and the carbon behind the cold chain.
Who holds the right to refrigerate?
Procurement, distribution and spatial politics — how the vertical space inside a fridge maps onto the power hierarchy of a household
The semiotics of leftovers: frugality and the boundaries of disgust
Why the same food is "meal prep" in a glass container and "dangerous leftovers" in a knotted plastic bag
The fridge door as curatorial space: memory, performance, identity
Magnets, children's drawings, expired coupons and travel souvenirs — the household's external performance, staged on an appliance
The tyranny of labels: deconstructing best before and use by
Two labels, a blurred line, and a food industry that manufactures safety anxiety to accelerate turnover and evade responsibility
The illusion of preservation and systemic waste
Bauman's liquid modernity, the sense of security the fridge sells, and the astonishing household waste that security produces
Hoarding and doomsday psychology: the stuffed fridge as emotional solace
Why an empty fridge triggers existential anxiety, and how food hoarding works as a defence against a sense of lost control
Smart fridges and surveillance capitalism
Internal cameras, auto-ordering and healthy-eating suggestions — the kitchen as a new terminal for household data collection
The de-refrigerator movement and alternative food networks
Eco-Marxism, degrowth, community fridges and the revival of fermentation — is there an antidote to the fortress?
Final presentations and the unplugged celebration
Fifteen minutes of summary, then the projects — and a picnic that requires no refrigeration at all