Dr. Lynn Mafofo is a linguist and a lecturer at the University of the Western Cape. She is now an emerging researcher under the Critical Food Studies - Andrew W. Mellon funded humanities Suprainstitutional Programme housed under the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the University of the Western Cape. Her doctoral thesis extensively looked at the issues of globalisation and marketisation in relation to institutional branding of the South African universities. Dr. Lynn Mafofo’s current research broadly engages with issues of food branding, advertising, positioning, and consumption in the formal and informal sector particularly in the Western Cape province of South Africa. Looking at the background of both the global and local food systems where food seems to acquire collective meaning through being imagined, symbolised and ritualised, she is interested in exploring, how the massive corporatization of food in the global world and food centred discursive strategies seem to embody ideological elements that resonate with particular socially accepted ideas, feelings or desires of offshore economies at the expense of local economies thereby subjecting unhealthy food consumption. This includes exploring how the literal or visual representation and positioning of food and cuisine divulge diverse historical, political, raced and gendered subjective identities and world views, in the context of food sovereignty as a radical alternative to neoliberal perspective to food security in the global south. She is extending this work to also understand perceptions and representations of food gardening in urban cities in Africa that seem to hinder food self-sufficiency practices in relation to food security
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