Week 4 Session: Fridge archaeology

This week’s question: who holds the right to refrigerate — and how does vertical space map onto household power?

Inherited from week 3: the cold chain fills the box. Now we ask who governs it once it is full.

Before the session#

Bring the interior of a real refrigerator — your family’s, your share house’s, or a communal one you have access to — as either a photograph or a hand-drawn map.

Hand-drawn is better, and this is not a matter of taste. A photograph records everything and shows nothing; drawing forces you to decide what matters, which is the skill this module is teaching. If you draw it, mark the shelves, the door, the drawers, and roughly what is where.

Do not tidy first. Every year somebody does, and it costs them the best material they had.

If it is a shared fridge, tell the people you share with what it is for.

Read the Miller and Shove excerpts.

In the session#

We build one large power map on the board from everybody’s fridges, marking three kinds of territory:

• Authority zones — eye-level shelves, the front, the places whose contents belong to someone with the standing to claim them
• Marginal zones — the bottom drawer, the back of the middle shelf, wherever the health food and the least powerful housemate’s groceries end up
• Tragedy of the commons zones — the unclaimed. Mouldy takeaway nobody ordered, condiments belonging to a person who moved out, the jar that predates the current tenancy

Then:

• Archaeology (30 min). Working oldest-first, like a real dig. For the oldest thing anybody brought: who put it there, why has nobody removed it, and who would have the standing to?
• The three powers (25 min). Procurement, distribution, disposal. In each household, do they sit with one person or several? What changes when they split?
• Unwritten rules (20 min). Pooling. Most rooms find the same four or five rules recurring across unrelated households, which raises the question of where a convention nobody transmits comes from.

Afterwards#

The Fridge Ethnography opens today and is due Friday 2 April, at the end of this module. That gives you three weeks, not an afternoon — and the break afterwards is not fieldwork time you can lean on. Today’s map is a legitimate first artefact for it.

Settle two things this week rather than in week 6: whether the people you live with consent to being written about, and whether you can observe without tidying. The second is harder than it sounds.