Outputs

In October 2026 JC and Johanna will discuss Milk & the Politics of Loss. Our relationship to milk is shaped by colonialism, industrial capitalism, nationalism, environmental concern and other global and historical forces that are routinely obscured. Despite this, milk remains one of the most familiar substances in everyday life. Drawing on ethnographic work with pastoralists, farmers as well as archival work we argue that milk is an unusually powerful substance through which to understand the politics of loss. We ask what vanishes during the transformation of food systems? Which losses are easier to trace? Who bears the cost of the loss?

In March 2026 Johanna and JC presented at the launch of the international African Livestock Observatory, based at the University of Reading. Their talk focused on the establishment of formal dairying in colonial Kenya, including the importation of British dairy breeds and the assumptions that informed the construction of dairy processing centres, such as the one established in Mariakani in the 1950s. They drew on archival work at the Food and Agricultural Organisation, and in the Kenya National Archives, and looked at both the impacts of these new dairies, and the forms of resistance that met them.

JC and Johanna focused on milk as a lens through which we can begin to understand the colonial everyday, placing the focus on incremental shifts that shaped and transformed peoples lives, but which remain largely hidden. The explored how everyday milk infrastructures conceal long-term moral and ecological logics that are often masked by the language of progress, development, or hygiene. And yet, when people talk about milk, they’re often talking about so much more: about childhood, land, labour, control, and care.

Johanna and JC’s talk, titled Milk is Never Just Milk: Controversy, Emotion, and Heritage, shared some of the reactions that they have encountered when researching milk. Whilst they knew that milk was political when the project began, the initial reception to the project in the press made them realise how strongly people feel about milk, and what an emotionally charge subject it had the potential to be. This experience led them to understand that milk is never just milk, its tied up in nostalgia, memory and home, as much as its entangled within global industry.

In this talk for the Global and Local Histories seminar series, Johanna shared the projects work on how the dairy industry masks the intimacy of milk. Whilst we may be familiar with Daisy, grazing in her field of buttercups, milk marketing rarely shows her calf. The fact that the milk we drink is produced by mothers is obscured. This reflection has led us to think through the contradictions of milk, produced by mothers, but distributed as a global industrial commodity. We looked at the material culture of milk and dairy, and how this story can be told through the different vessels people have used to store, carry and process milk.