A wall of filing cabinets and box files seen at an angle, drawn in sepia ink. One drawer stands open, holding a thick stack of papers with a rubber stamp resting on top and a bundle of documents tied with string, on a warm cream ground.

Policies

Fieldwork ethics, food safety, attendance, extensions and academic integrity — the rules this course runs on.

This course asks more of your private life than most. You’ll observe real kitchens, write about people you live with, and in week 9 be asked to draw your own fridge at its worst. The policies below exist because of that, and they are not boilerplate — read the first two before week 4.

Fieldwork ethics

The Fridge Ethnography requires you to observe a real household. That household contains people who did not enrol in this course.

Consent comes first, in advance. Anyone identifiable in your fieldwork must agree to being written about before you start, and must know it is coursework that two staff members will read. “I’m doing a project on fridges” is not adequate; “I’m going to write about how this household decides what to throw out, and my tutors will read it” is.

Anonymise the household, not just the individuals. No real names, no identifying photographs, and no details that would identify the house to someone who knows it. A pseudonym over an otherwise identifying description is not anonymisation.

Consent can be withdrawn at any point, including after submission. If somebody changes their mind, tell Simone Ravel immediately. We’ll work out what to do with the material, and you won’t be penalised for it. This has happened before and it has never cost anybody marks.

If you cannot get consent, that fridge is not your site. A workplace or communal fridge with no single owner, or your own household of one, are both legitimate alternatives. Ask early rather than proceeding and hoping.

Never photograph a person. Fridges, yes. Their owners, no.

Food, allergens and safety

Three sessions involve eating or making food: the week 1 blind tasting, the week 11 fermentation workshop, and the week 12 unplugged gathering.

Tell us about allergies and dietary requirements by the end of week 1, or earlier if you already know. Email Simone Ravel. Samples are adjusted rather than skipped — nobody should be the person sitting out.

Nothing is compulsory to eat. You can participate in the week 1 tasting by observing and recording other people’s responses; this is not a lesser form of participation and is not marked down.

Week 11 covers ferment safety properly before anyone touches a jar — what makes a ferment safe, what makes one fail, and how to tell. Do not skip that part and start improvising.

Do not experiment with high-risk foods. The week 11 removal trial is about butter, eggs, tomatoes and condiments. It is not about chicken, seafood, or anything you are unsure of. If you are unsure, that is your answer — ask first.

Week 12 is bring-a-dish. Label what you bring with its ingredients.

Personal material and wellbeing

Some of this course’s exercises are personally exposing, particularly week 9, which asks about scarcity, control and what an empty fridge feels like.

Material you produce in tutorials stays in the room unless you choose otherwise. If you use another student’s drawing, interview or account in your own assessment, you need their agreement and you anonymise them — the same rule as for households.

You are never required to disclose anything about your own circumstances, finances or health. “I’d rather not say” is a complete answer and will not be followed up.

If an exercise raises something heavier than coursework, the university’s counselling service is free and confidential, and either convenor will help you get in touch without making a discussion of it. Food insecurity in particular is common, rarely mentioned, and directly adjacent to this course’s subject matter; if that is your situation, tell us and we will point you at the right support rather than the reading list.

Attendance and participation

Participation is worth 10% and is assessed on whether you arrive with the week’s material, not on how much you speak.

Missing a tutorial with advance notice, and doing the preparation anyway, is not penalised. Email whoever teaches that week — Simone Ravel for weeks 1–6 and 10–12, Casper Nowak for weeks 7–9.

Two exercises genuinely cannot be made up later: the week 8 waste audit, which depends on records kept at the time, and the week 1 blind tasting, which cannot be repeated once you know what the samples were. Full detail on both is above, under Food, allergens and safety and Assessment. If you’ll miss either, tell us in advance and we’ll arrange an alternative.

Late work and extensions

Extensions are straightforward to arrange before a deadline and difficult afterwards. Ask early; you do not need to be in crisis to qualify, and you do not need to explain more than you want to.

Work submitted late without an extension attracts the university’s standard penalty. If something has gone wrong and you have not been able to ask in advance, contact us anyway — late is better than silent, and we would rather sort it out than mark a zero.

Academic integrity

The usual rules apply: the work is yours, sources are cited, and anything you did not write is attributed.

Two things specific to this course:

Fieldwork cannot be borrowed. The audits, censuses, photographs and drawings are the evidence base for three of the four assessments. Submitting fieldwork you did not conduct is fabrication, not plagiarism, and is treated more seriously.

Generative AI may be used for drafting, structuring and editing, and must be declared — a short note at the end of the submission saying what you used and for what. It may not be used to invent fieldwork, generate observations you did not make, or produce citations you have not read. This course spends a semester arguing that the difference between a claim and the evidence for it is where all the interesting politics live, so we are strict about it here.

Adjustments

If you have an access plan, send it to Simone Ravel in week 1 and we will implement it without further discussion. If you do not have one but something about the course’s format is a barrier — the fieldwork, the group work, the food, the presentation in week 12 — say so and we will adjust. Every exercise in this course has an alternative form; none of them requires you to disclose why you need it.

Who to ask

Neither of us minds being the wrong first choice. Ask whoever seems closest, and we’ll point you the right way.