Josefine Östrup Backe

Research profile

I am a PhD in service studies. I hold a Masters' degree in Business Administration with tourism as a special field, from the Department of Service Management (2004), and acheived my doctoral degree in 2020.

In my doctoral thesis, Enacting 'the local' in culinary tourism - a study of culinary actors and their pracitces, I studied how culinary tourism is enacted as an economic, social, and cultural activity, through the notion of “the local”. The vision of Sweden – a new culinary nation, and a culinary tourism producer network in Southern Sweden act as examples of this process. The empirical data was collected by an ethnographic approach, through observations, conversations/interviews and the study of various documents. Taking a practice theoretical perspective, the thesis analyses how the local in culinary tourism is enacted in three practice-bundles: framing the ideal culinary destination, organising culinary tourism, and performing the local in culinary tourism. The analysis demonstrates how the local is enacted as a combination of acts such as positioning a culinary tourism profile, staging of culinary products and experiences, negotiating what or whom should be included in a culinary network, or ways of talking about the local as a part of rural policy, ways of designing food tours, or specific uses of local food products and other items in culinary activities. The thesis contributes to understanding the processes involved with the planning and performing of tourism experiences and activities, as well as the complexities therein. Thereby different tensions that emerge in this vein also become visible, such as tensions between the local and non-local, the commercial and ideal, as well as the physical and more abstract elements linked to the local.

Research Projects

Digital platforms and new food practices: food consumption in times of crisis (funded by Formas, 2020-2021)

The aim of this project is to investigate how the Corona crisis is changing the way consumers use digital food platforms. The question we ask is: how does food consumption change in times of crisis and what role do digital platforms play? We explore how consumers have digitalized their food practices during an ongoing crisis and what consequences this has for how food is consumed. Research has shown that everyday food practices are difficult to change, and against this background the objective is to understand what roles digital platforms play in supporting new forms of consumption and making household food practices more resilient and sustainable. In the project, practice theory is used to study the different ways in which the consumer now buys, cooks and eat food, and to show how digital platforms help the consumer create new food practices. Digital ethnography will be used in the project and this method consists of three parts: new ways of ordering online, creative solutions for cooking and dining online, and online food activism. In these three areas, different digital platforms are used, and we will do online interviews with consumers about how these platforms are utilized, but also interviews where we participate in cooking and dining in online video calls. The results of this project enable us to understand how food consumption is reorganized due to societal changes, and in the longer term understand how sustainable digital food platforms can be designed and realized.

The project is conducted with Prof. Christian Fuentes (PI) from Högskolan i Borås and PhD Emma Samsioe from ISM.

Read more about the project