Dr. Raúl Matta

Raúl Matta is a researcher at the Institute and Principal Investigator in the project Food2Gather “Exploring foodscapes as public spaces for integration”, funded by HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area) and the European Commission (H2020). He received his PhD degree from Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris in 2009, and has been since conducting research at the intersection of the anthropology of food, heritage, and cultural studies, with an emphasis on the cultural and political uses of food and cooking by different actors and stakeholders. He has held research and teaching appointments in France, Germany and Malaysia and conducted fieldwork in Peru, Mexico, Malaysia and Germany. Between 2014 and 2018, he has led the projects “Food as Cultural Heritage”, based at KAEE and funded by the DFG (Eigene Stelle), and FoodHerit, based at the IRD (France) and funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR). His work has been published in journals such as Social Anthropology, the International Journal of Cultural Property, Food and Foodways, and in several edited volumes. He is member of the editorial board of the journal Anthropology of Food.

In the framework of Food2Gather, he explores the role of food in the articulation of relations between migrants and host communities in the German public space, and what practices in turn develop as a response to these reassembled contexts.