Published by SHARECITY on the 21st December 2020.

 

Season’s Greetings 2020 from SHARECITY

 

By Anna, Vanessa, Monika, Louise, and Alwynne,

The SHARECITY Team

 

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Congratulations for getting to the end of 2020! The entire SHARECITY Team would like to wish everyone a happy holiday period!

Certainly, 2020 has been a year that we will not forget in a hurry, with our lives and many food sharing activities – from Ireland to the USA – dramatically altered by the COVID-19 Global Pandemic. That we have all continued on with our usual duties (and many more new ones!) and managed to come out the other side is something to be very proud of in itself. We hope you have equally been able to manage the new demands with your work and life under these novel conditions and we would like to thank you for the support you have all given the SHARECITY research project over the years.

Thank you for all your support in 2020!

Source: Unsplash

 

In January 2020 and March 2020, we said goodbye to SHARECITY Research Assistant Vivien Franck and Post-Doctoral Researchers, Dr Agnese Cretella and Dr Stephen MacKenzie, who all went on to exciting new roles in Germany, Ireland, and the UK. We thank them for their contributions to SHARECITY and wish them all the best in the future.

In February 2020 we were joined by a new Research Assistant Vanessa Lucy, and by two Post-Doctoral Researchers, Dr Alwynne McGeever and Dr Louise Fitzgerald in June 2020.

In November 2020, SHARECITY PhD student Monika Rut (now Dr Monika Rut!) successfully defended her thesis on “ICT mediated food sharing and food transitions towards sustainable food systems in Singapore”. Her research includes published papers and a book chapter which can be accessed from our website. Monika remains with SHARECITY as a Research Assistant investigating the response of food sharing initiatives in Dublin during the outbreak of COVID-19.

 

Highlights for 2020

 

We want to share and celebrate some of the activities and outputs that SHARECITY was involved in throughout 2020. This year, SHARECITY has been primarily focused on expanding engagement with the SHARE IT Tool Kit and future scenarios for sustainable food sharing. With a new workstream on the impacts of COVID-19 for urban food sharing emerging in recent months.

 

Awards and Recognition:

SHARECITY Principal Investigator, Prof. Anna Davies, was presented with an inaugural European Research Council (ERC) Public Engagement with Research Award 2020 for the Category: Online and Social Media in relation to the SHARECITY project. Awarded on 7^th July 2020. There were 3 winners out of 138 submissions. This is the first award of its kind, which the ERC has launched to put the spotlight on how its grantees inspire the public with their research.

Prof. Anna Davies was awarded with the first European Research Council (ERC) ‘Public Engagement with Research Award’ for the online and social media category in July 2020.

Source: European Research Council and SHARECITY

 

#SHARECITY2020 Virtual Conference:

The SHARECITY Team hosted the #SHARECITY2020 Virtual Conference which took place from 22^nd – 24^th September 2020. It featured 20+ presentations from current SHARECITY team members, former team members, and food sharing academics and practitioners. A highlight was the Live Q&A Plenary Panel. We were joined by 448 people for the entire online event, from 31 countries, who viewed the videos 978 times. It featured 26 videos all up including presentations, the live Q&A, interviews with food sharers, and wrap-up videos. The recorded presentations are all free and available online (via our website or our SHARECITY YouTube channel).

 

Academic outputs 2020:

• 37 x presentations at international and national events, seminars, and virtual conferences.
• 4 x open access publications in 2020 including:
  • Davies, A.R. (2020) Toward a Sustainable Food System for the European Union: Insights from the Social Sciences. One Earth, 3(1), 27–31, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2020.06.008.
  • Davies, A.R., Cretella, A., Edwards, F. and Marovelli, B. (2020) The social practices of hosting P2P social dining events: Insights for sustainable tourism. Journal of Sustainable Tourism. DOI: 1080/09669582.2020.1838526.
  • Edwards, F. (2020) Overcoming the social stigma of consuming food waste by dining at the Open Table. Agriculture and Human Values. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-020-10176-9.
  • Rut, M., Davies, A.R. and Ng, H. (2020) Participating in food waste transitions: Exploring surplus food redistribution in Singapore through the ecologies of participation framework. Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, DOI: 1080/1523908X.2020.1792859.

 

The figure below provides an overview of the subject classifications given to journal article publications by Scimago from the entire SHARECITY project to date. The majority of papers fall within the broad Social Sciences category with a particular contribution to Sociology and Political Science, and Geography, Planning, and Development.

This figure showcases the SHARECITY journal article disciplinary classifications for the duration of the project so far (2016-2020).

Source: Scimago 2020 https://www.scimagojr.com/

 

Other outputs: 

• 1 x Book chapter published: Davies, A. R. (2020). Food Sharing. In J. Duncan, M. Carolan & J. S. C. Wiskerke (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Sustainable and Regenerative Food Systems (1st edition, pp. 204-317). Taylor & Francis, London.
• SHARE IT: the Sustainability Assessment Tool Kit was launched.
• Davies, A.R. (2020, October). Reset, Restructure and Repair: COVID-19 and the Environment. Trinity Today 2020, pp. 28-29, Trinity College Dublin.
• Jackson, P., Davies, A.R. [et al.] (2020). In Science Advice for Policy by European Academies. (SAPEA, 2020) A sustainable food system for the European Union. SAPEA: Berlin. DOI: https://doi.org/10.26356/sustainablefood.

You can keep up to date with our recent publications and other research outputs here: https://sharecity.ie/outputs/publications/

Source: SHARECITY Website

 

What’s Next for 2021?

 

The SHARE IT Tool Kit

Dr Alwynne McGeever, Post-doctoral Researcher, joined SHARECITY in June 2020 to assist with the ongoing development, distribution, and engagement with the SHARE IT Tool Kit. Alwynne and Anna have recently completed the Horizon 2020 Booster programme to support the development of a business plan for rolling out the tool in order to sustain it beyond the end of the research project. Alwynne is also liaising with new food sharers interested in using SHARE IT and is planning to reach out to local authorities, government agencies, and retailers in 2021 to disseminate the tool and its capabilities for developing more sustainable urban food systems.

If you’re interested in the SHARE IT Toolkit, please get in contact with Alwynne via email at amcgeeve@tcd.ie.

Learn more about SHARE IT below: 

Learn about our free Tool Kit: SHARE IT. It can be used to measure the positive environmental, social, and economic impacts that food sharing practitioners are having.

Source: SHARECITY YouTube

 

Food sharing futures

Dr Louise Fitzgerald also joined SHARECITY as a Post-doctoral Researcher in June 2020 to help develop future scenarios for sustainable food sharing. This will build on the findings of the SHARING FUTURES workshop held at the end of 2019. The goal of this scenario work and visualisation is to develop outputs which will engage policy makers and shapers. This will contribute towards the development of a manifesto for sustainable food sharing as a final output of SHARECITY.

Listen to Dr Louise Fitzgerald talk about the future of urban food sharing and what the Three Horizons Framework could mean for sustainable urban food futures.

Source: SHARECITY YouTube

 

COVID-19 and food sharing

Dr Monika Rut is currently examining the impacts of COVID-19 on food sharing initiatives and practices in Dublin. In this work, Monika has been collecting online data from social media networks, policy briefings and news websites and she is working to analyse challenges and responses that have emerged across different types of food sharing initiatives (community gardens, food banks, and soup kitchens) and food contexts (growing, eating together, and redistributing surplus food) during the COVID-19 outbreak in Dublin in 2020.

In Dublin and many other global cities, the spread of COVID-19 meant that many food sharing initiatives were severely affected with widespread community garden and local market closures.

Source: Photowind

 

We hope you enjoyed learning more about our 2020 activities as much as we enjoyed bringing them to fruition. Once again, we wish you a happy and safe holiday season and please stay tuned for what’s next in 2021 for the SHARECITY Research Team.

We will continue to share our project’s outputs on our Website, and via Blogs like these, and also via our social media channels: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram!

Do get in touch with us about any questions or feedback through the social media links above or reach out to us via email at sharecity@tcd.ie.

 

Thank you,

Anna, Vanessa, Monika, Louise, and Alwynne,

The SHARECITY Team