Siyu Li

About me: Siyu Li is a PhD candidate at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) and the Department of Consumer Research, Communication and Food Sociology at Justus-Liebig-University Giessen. She completed her master's degree in cultural anthropology at Eötvös Loránd University, also she studied global art and curatorial practice at the Tokyo University of the Arts as a research student.

Her doctoral research explores the shelf life and biopolitics of food, focusing on how expiration dates function as temporal infrastructures that govern edibility, safety, and value within supermarket systems. Extending beyond retail, she traces the trajectories of food after it is removed from shelves through ethnographic fieldwork with Foodsharing, examining how leftover food is revalued and recirculated. Alongside this, she develops a research-creation practice that translates theoretical inquiry into artistic projects, exploring forms of knowledge beyond conventional sociological frameworks while fostering dialogue between academia and the public.

Dissertation working title: I am immortal: a research-creation of parasitism and mutuality in expired food

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Stefan Wahlen

ORCID ID: 0009-0008-4799-9567

Publications

Guest Editor

Embodiment - Issue 21: Spring 2027 - On_Culture: The Open Journal for the Study of Culture

Publications

Li, Siyu. 2024. “Microbial Thinking”. KULT_online, no. 69 (April). https://doi.org/10.22029/ko.2024.1443.
Li, Siyu. 2024. “After Trash: Temperament of Penicillium Societies.” On_Culture: The Open Journal for the Study of Culture 17 <https://doi.org/10.22029/oc.2024.1448>.
Li, Siyu. 2026. “Welcome to the Living Room: Co-Composing an Edible Landscape,” in Cecilia Åsberg and Myra J. Hird (eds), Waste Futures, in Oxford Intersections: Cultures of Waste (Oxford, online edn., Oxford Academic, forthcoming).

Conference Presentations

Our Food-Webbed World: Interdisciplinary Culinary Landscapes, Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Lisbon. March 6th-8th 2025
Rethinking Marketing for a More-Than-Human World, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark. September 11th-12th 2025
From Relations to Politics - Pathways Toward a Planetary Praxis, Panel on Planetary Thinking, Ebsdorfergrund,

Germany. November 18-20 2025
Nature(s) in Narrative, panel: Talking tables: food, stories, and social encounters, International Society for Folk Narrative Research (ISFNR), Reykjavik, Iceland, 13-16 June 2026.
Anthropology: Possibilities in a Polarised World, panel: Moving Beyond the Ivory Tower: Experiences for a Public Anthropology of Food [FoodNet], The European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA), Poznań, Poland, 21-24 July 2026

Art Exhibition 🧃

Research Interests

Memberships: GCSC Graduate Student Committee member

Research Groups

🫧RA09 Ecology and the Study of Culture

🫀Interfaces of the Study of Culture and Life Sciences

Associations

European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA)

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