Natalja Czarnecki is a Lecturer in the Departments of Liberal Arts and Critical Visual Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago during the Academic Year of 2022-23. She was a Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellow in the Social Sciences Division at the University of Chicago (Global Studies and Anthropology) from 2020-2022.  She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in August, 2020.

She is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research examines food and food safety in a global, post-Cold War context. Her three-year ethnographic study focuses on food safety management and public experiences of trust and risk in post-Soviet Georgia through a linguistic, semiotic, and culturally theoretical ethnographic lens. By “post-Soviet,” she means the decades-long project of “harmonizing” post-Soviet food safety reform in relation to emergent and global forms of food governance-as-moral authority: The European Union (EU), United States (US), and post-Soviet Russian understandings of food safety as moralized technoscience.

Her research demonstrates that post-Soviet Georgia is a global “periphery” in relation to competing forms of post-Cold War legal governance.  Her ethnographic study  is revelatory in relation to everyday and experiential battles over competing meanings of “food safety.” She contexualizes Georgian food safety reform in relation to globalized food safety authorities and their deferment to “scientific opinion.”  She argues that such uncontroversialized forms of governance fail to account for the specifically post-Soviet, morally meaningful relationships to food in Georgian households, bodies, and the women who are tasked with ensuring and reproducing their families’ livelihoods and well-being.  Her work demonstrates how EU, US, and Russian claims to legally “good” food safety reproduce Cold War battles over governmental approaches to public well-being. Her focus on everyday linguistic and semiotic communications of “food safety” in the post-Soviet periphery brings together the study of technoscientific expertise and knowledge, moral authority, biopolitical governance, and public trust in the context of uncertainty and meaning-making in a “post-truth” world.

Her current book project, an ethnography of public trust through the lens of regulatory authority and reform in post-Soviet Tbilisi, Georgia, focuses on everyday interactions between institutions that battle, in terms of post-Soviet bodies and the meanings of gendered care, to govern food and moral authority of bodily and social being itself.  Her ethnography is multi-sited in the post-Soviet world.  It focuses on the liberalist-capitalist (EU) rubric of “food safety reform” in the post-socialist context – a state bureaucracy, official and unofficial food (“wet”) markets, and practices of food consumers themselves.

Her work has been supported by grants including the Fulbright-Hays’s Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, the University of Chicago Social Sciences Division’s Long-Term Research Grant, and the American Research Institute of the South Caucasus’s Junior Research Fellowship.

Her future research will build on her work on the technoscientific expertise, moral authority, and biopolitical governance.  Her second book project will ask about the kinds of moral authority in making and in practice as the US and EU grapple with regulating the emergent high-tech meat and “non-meat” markets.