Digital Disconnections (DigiD): Food, Poverty and Digital Inequality in Germany

• Applicant: Katharina Graf, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 562203443

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, the home has become a major site of digitalization, including the kitchen and food-related work. As a result, many food practices are now carried out digitally via smartphone apps, from online shopping or recipe selection to food sharing. However, scholarship on food, poverty and digitalization reveals that this development disadvantages marginal groups such as low-income households, in particular women and children, and intersects with many other forms of marginalization such as education, ethnicity, language, place of residence and more. Still, little is known about how these households perceive and manage food poverty and digital disadvantages in everyday practices such as food provisioning and preparation. At the same time, the ongoing disruptions of global supply chains and the rising cost of living, especially of everyday essentials such as energy and food, have made the structural dimensions of such disadvantages more visible. The proposed project will bring together food poverty and digital inequality through the notion of digital disconnections and thereby urge us to understand food poverty and digital inequality as both an everyday lived experience and a structural and intersectional problem that disproportionally affects low-income and marginalized households. The main aim of this ethnographic research is to explore the manifestation, experience and management of multiple and intersecting digital disconnections in domestic contexts with respect to cooking and eating in Germany. This will allow us to understand the structural dimensions of food poverty and digital inequality in welfare states and knowledge and information societies such as the German one and their implications for socio-digital participation more broadly. Four operative goals are derived from this overarching objective. First, the project proposes to develop a methodological toolkit that will permit, second, to study the digital disconnections in the everyday lives of low-income households. Through both digital and immersive ethnography, it will then seek to examine the lived experience of digital disconnections and how they are managed in everyday domestic life. The findings from this exploratory fieldwork will, fourth, be analyzed through the notion of digital disconnections with the ambition to contribute towards a more equal (digital) future.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants