FABIO PARASECOLI is Associate Professor and Coordinator of Food Studies at The New School for Public Engagement. His work explores the intersections between food, media, and politics. He studied East Asian cultures and political science in Rome, Naples, and Beijing, and received his doctorate in agricultural sciences in Hohenheim, Germany.

Fabio’s research as a GIDEST Faculty Fellow will build on his previous work on semiotics in food, design, and popular culture. It will focus on assessing the potential of applied sociosemiotics, which explores issues such as the connections between connotations and ideological systems; the distribution of patterns of signification across time, space, and social groups; and the relevance of social tensions, negotiations, and conflicts in the creation of meaning as a tool for the ethnographic observation of designers, architects, and other actors in food design. The central question his research will be seeking to answer is: Can the interpretation of utterances, objects, and practices as systems of signs contribute to the understanding of the cultures and behaviors of individuals and communities embracing a design approach to food, as well as to the advancement of the field itself—both in its theoretical approaches and in its applied aspects?