Cheese Politics offered a unique and immersive experience, blending cheese tasting with reflections on current ecological and social issues. Through this innovative approach, the event invited participants to rethink the agricultural world from both a sensory and intellectual perspective.
Cheese Politics is a conference born from a collaboration between the Institut d'études avancées in Nantes and the Origens Media Lab research laboratory based in Clermont-Ferrand, as part of the Living Through the Lens of Planetary Boundaries chair and Diego Landivar’s residency.
The Participants
Diego Landivar is a resident of the Living Through the Lens of Planetary Boundaries chair at the Institute. He contributed to framing ecological issues and sustainable solutions within the conference, linking them to the concept of planetary boundaries and how they translate into agricultural practices.
Patrice Cayre is a sociologist specializing in the agricultural world, with a particular focus on ecological crises and transitions in farming. For over 15 years, his research with livestock farmers and producers in the Massif Central has explored the sociotechnical and ethical dynamics of agricultural actors facing environmental upheavals.
Emmanuel Bonnet is a lecturer and researcher in management sciences, specializing in collective learning dynamics in innovative projects. His research on learning within agroecological collectives and alternative ontologies has provided fresh insights into collective practices in response to agricultural and ecological crises.
Nathan Ben Kemoun holds a PhD in management sciences, with research focusing on ways of life and engagement in the face of climate change. He explores policies of sufficiency within planetary boundaries, seeking to understand how to reconcile social justice, ecological redirection, and quality of life in collective projects.
This conference was designed based on over 15 years of research led by Patrice Cayre, a sociologist specializing in the agricultural world, with farmers and producers from Saint-Nectaire and Cantal in the Massif Central. The aim of the conference was to reinvent traditional formats of scientific dissemination in the social sciences.
Participants were first invited to taste different types of cheese (industrial, pasteurized, unpasteurized, farm-made, or organic) and engage in a personal tasting experience that was primarily sensory and practical. From this olfactory, visual, and gustatory experience, they were then guided to explore a range of issues facing the cheese world, within the context of technical and administrative modernization, climate change, and ecological collapse.
Rather than analyzing ecological issues through major reports or grand scientific and political meta-narratives (what could be called a Macro-Anthropocene), this conference invited us to grasp a Micro-Anthropocene—where the upheavals of our contemporary world can be understood through a single cheese, its rind, its texture, its aromas, and the multitude of living beings it harbors (bacteria, fungi, microorganisms, etc.).
Step by step, this conference led us through a detailed ethnographic journey alongside farmers and cheesemakers who are striving to carve out spaces of subsistence amidst the shifting political and ecological demands of our time.
