Kick-off symposium: a short report
1 February 2024, by Admin

Photo: privat
On Friday, 19 January 2024, the one-day kick-off symposium of the junior research group Meat the bioeconomy - the meat industry as part of the bioeconomy: Internationalization, geographies of labor, and hegemonic strategies took place at the University of Hamburg. Here you can find out more about our project, which runs from April 2023 to March 2028.
The objective of the symposium was to present the joint research design and the subprojects of the junior research group's members to an audience of 40 experts, to put them up for discussion and to gather comments, suggestions and criticism. In addition to selected discussants who had read the research designs in advance, students and other colleagues from other research projects and from non-academic contexts were also invited.
The program for the symposium was both tight and varied. Moderated by Katharina Vöhler three presentations were given by members of the junior research group, each followed by a ten-minute prepared commentary on theoretical and methodological aspects and an open discussion with the entire plenary.
Christin Bernhold (head of the junior research group) opened the event with a warm welcome and an introduction to the overall project and the symposium. The first session then began with the lecture Contested meat hegemony and the relationship between industry and the state by Christian Stache and Klara Kolhoff. After a one-hour lunch break, Christin Bernhold and Emilia Ormaechea continued the symposium with their talk on The German and Argentinian meat industry in global perspective: internationalization and unequal development. In the last panel of the day on Production relations in transition? Corporate strategies, labor and migration in the German meat industry, John Lütten and Marwaa Zazai presented their research projects. The symposium ended in the early evening after a joint closing session.
The symposium provided an excellent platform for a comprehensive exchange of ideas and insights into the complex dynamics of the meat industry in the context of the bioeconomy. The different research and working contexts of the speakers and participants contributed to a stimulating discussion. Now that the research designs have been developed in the first phase of the project, the phase of intensive field research is about to begin. The many perspectives from outside the junior research group on the subprojects have helped a lot to make the necessary concretizations for this research phase .
We would therefore like to thank everyone who took the time to spend an entire day with us.