Lucy Aphramor

Lucy Aphramor: I grew up on the outskirts of Manchester, a city built on profit from enslavement.  

My early pull to food and farming led me to study nutrition and dietetics at Surrey University, followed by a Certificate in Permaculture Design from Hong University (SPACE). A continuing education Certificate in Women’s Studies and Literature, again at Surrey University, introduced me to criticality and sparked a passion for poetry. After self-employment running a small market garden, an even smaller bakery, and several standard length marathons, I worked in mental health advocacy before entering dietetics in the NHS. Patient stories caused me to become concerned about fat stigma and to question the usefulness of a lifestyle approach to public health. What about trauma? What about racism? Disability justice? Poverty?  I developed a health-justice approach, Well Now, that acknowledges the impact of power in nutrition-related conditions, like diabetes and heart disease. Subsequent contributions to research and scholarship were helped by my appointment as Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Justice, Coventry University. I’m interested in food work that takes seriously compassion, trauma, pedagogy, creativity, salutogenesis, white supremacy, story and more to serve social justice. I have taught  - and performed social action poetry - widely in academic, activist, general, and LGBTQ+ community spaces at home and overseas. I left the NHS to run a social enterprise, later focusing on change through training, consultancy and performance. I am a founder member of the World Critical Dietetics Association and hold a PhD by Publication in Critical Dietetics from Coventry University. A significant flaw in my earlier work was that it neglected ontologies of interconnection (hallmarks of indigeneity, animism, liberation theology) and therefore unwittingly reproduced coloniality.  

I am delighted to return to Coventry as Associate Professor in Gender, Power and the Right to Food at the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience where we are working to set the record queer.   

My research interests and approaches include critical pedagogy, reindigenising and decolonising food work, critical dietetics, artivism, intersectional feminism, fat studies, mad studies, disability justice