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Dr Alison Leitch Contact Details Office: C3B/520 Phone: (61 2) 9850 8102 Fax No: (61 2) 9850 9355 E-mail: aleitch@scmp.mq.edu.au

Profile

Alison Leitch studied history, political economy and Italian, majoring in social anthropology at the University of Sydney in the early 1980s. After completing her undergraduate studies, Alison spent two years living and working in Tuscany. This experience inspired her to undertake ethnographic research into the world of work in the marble quarries of Carrara, Italy, combining her interest in cultural history with the anthropology and sociology of work. After completing her PhD in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sydney, Alison moved to the United States where she taught at a number of Universities, including the University of Texas, Austin; University of California, Santa Cruz; New York University; and briefly, at the University of Columbia, New York.

During these years, Alison began a new research project looking at the emergence of the Slow Food movement in Italy. This research resulted in the publication of articles in various international journals, including a contribution to a photo book on Lardo di Colonnata published by the prestigious Federico Motta Editore in Milan. This work followed an earlier collaboration with American photographer, Joel Leivick on a photo book about the Carrara quarries published by Stanford University Press.  Alison also worked with ethnomusicologist Steve Feld on a soundscape of MayDay in Carrara produced in 2002 with an accompanying booklet on the history of MayDay in Italy and its local significance.

Alison joined the Department of Sociology at Macquarie University in 2006. She is currently working on a number of projects that bring together her interest in the phenomenology of labour, ethnography, theories of modernity, visual sociology, food and politics.  She continues to work in Italy but, increasingly, she is also drawn to conducting ethnographic research in Australia. 

Current Research

Alison is interested in a number of areas including ethnographies of capitalism; food and politics; theories of labour; ideas of home; visual sociology; phenomenology. Currently she is working on two projects:

Seeing Through the Mountain: sensing place in the marble quarries of Carrara - a visual ethnography of Carrara quarries.

Why food matters: new directions in the politics of food - a comparative study looking at   transnational political alliances emerging in response to questions of food risk, food quality, the protection of cultural landscapes and agricultural biodiversity.

Significant Publications

2005   Why Food matters: new perspectives on the politics of food. (Forthcoming in Published proceedings of the 2005 TASA conference, Hobart, Tasmania)

2003a Slow Food and the Politics of Pork Fat: Italian Food and European Identity. Ethnos Vol 68(4): 437-462.

2003b Memories of Pork Fat. In Lardo di Colonnata Ed Orazio Olivieri. Federico Motta Editore. Milano

2000b The Social Life of Lardo: Slow Food in Fast Times. The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology Vol 64:103-118

1999 Afterword in Leivick, Joel. Carrara: the Marble Quarries of Tuscany. Stanford University Press

1996 The Life of Marble: the Experience and Meaning of Work in the Marble Quarries of Carrara. The Australian Journal of Anthropology Vol 7(3): 235-257.