Kontakt: james.farrer@kwi-nrw.de

Projekt am Centre:

Migrant Restaurants as Convivial Infrastructure in Germany and Japan

Building on earlier ethnographic research on migrant restaurants in Tokyo, Japan, this project examines migrant-run eateries as social spaces in small towns in Germany and Japan. Small towns and in Japan and Germany face similar demographic pressures of aging and outward population flows. Independent gastronomic businesses that long served as local social infrastructure are disappearing. Migrant-owned eateries represent both a potential lifeline and a perceived threat to local foodways and social life. This preliminary develops the concept of “convivial infrastructure” as a framework for investigating how everyday sociability is organised through commercial relationships, migrant labour and unequal access to resources. Through participant observation and interviews with owners, workers and customers, the research explores how restaurants sustain social networks while producing boundaries, hierarchies and obligations. Who performs the work of hospitality, on what terms, and for whose benefit? How do local migration histories, demographic change and institutional arrangements shape these spaces? The comparison treats conviviality as a contingent social accomplishment embedded in wider inequalities. It asks how both “local” and migrant restaurateurs negotiate livelihoods and recognition, and how everyday restaurant interactions reproduce, accommodate or challenge local social divisions.

Forschungsinteressen:

• Food studies, culinary mobilities, and culinary globalization
• International migration and intercultural encounters
• Urban communities, small businesses, and social infrastructure
• Sexuality, nightlife, and cosmopolitanism
• Urban ethnography and public ethnography