Abstract
Drawing on an urban research experiment and collaboration, this paper explores the role ofarts-based serious games in urban food security research. Serious Fun: Food for Thought developed out of a desire to explore creative ways of engaging food insecurity venturing beyond narrow developmentalist frames. Using arts-based research coupled with gaming principles, the purpose of the experiment was to engage different constituencies in an interactive way to unpack the food system in unequal societies, in this case, Cape Town.What the game enabled was a mirror, revealing the affective nuances of food systems in areal and almost immediate way that more traditional forms of research may be less able todo. In the paper, we propose four opportunities for enriching urban food research: First, weargue that research design is premised on knowledge and values researchers deem important. We believe that arts-based serious gaming offers alternative in-roads to engage with multiple everyday values, desires, perspectives and practices as a crucial process in re-arranging knowledge politics. Second, we suggest that traditional methods of knowledge production can be enriched by taking seriously affective forms of agency and tacit knowledge of urban residents and that this requires a revision of ethic-ing research. Third,we propose that where research is carried out matters and that Food for Thought enables asocio-spatial situation for grounded research. Finally, we argue that knowledge mobilisation is important and that arts-based serious games can offer spaces for surfacing, encountering and leveraging multiple knowledge. We propose that validating practical and affective knowledge of urban resident’s own foodways can strengthen urban food systems research.
