KISDtalk with Karla Scherer – Community Kitchens As Platforms For Women’s Agency In Food Systems

How can community kitchens be understood not just as places of cooking, but as important infrastructures of care, organisation, and women’s agency? In this KISDtalk, Karla Scherer invites us to rethink food systems beyond behaviour-focused sustainability approaches and to explore how women’s agency already unfolds within everyday kitchen practize.

This research talk explores community kitchens as integral components of food systems, shifting my research focus from influencing sustainable behaviour towards questions of women’s agency, care, and collective organisation. In many urban contexts, particularly in the Global South, community kitchens function as food system infrastructures sustained through everyday practices of cooking, coordination, and care, largely carried out by women. While behaviour-oriented sustainability approaches help illuminate daily food practices, they often fail to capture how agency emerges within systems shaped by gendered labour, informal governance, and long-term responsibilities. This session invites reflection on how designers working with food systems and social innovation can recognise and support women’s agency already present in community food spaces. Central to the discussion is how understanding different expressions of agency within a kitchen can guide design decisions, methods, and ethical boundaries. Rather than presenting solutions, the session opens a dialogue on how different forms of women’s agency can be recognised within community food spaces, and how design can contribute to strengthening these processes without framing agency as something to be given.

Karla Scherer
is a Brazilian PhD researcher in Design, currently developing her doctoral research at the Federal University of Paraná (Brazil), in collaboration with Loughborough University (UK), and undertaking a research stay at the Köln International School of Design (KISD). She is an industrial designer with almost two decades of experience developing household appliances. She holds a Master’s degree in Design for Sustainable Behaviour, and her current work is situated at the intersection of food systems, social innovation, and women’s agency studies, with a focus on community kitchens in vulnerable contexts as collective infrastructures sustained by women’s practices of care and organisation.
Her research investigates how designers can identify and support women’s agency within community-based food systems, contributing to more situated and ethical design practizes.

The KISDtalk will take place on ⏰ February 4, 5:30pm – 7pm in room 11. It is open to public – visitors are very welcome!

Pics © Karla Scherer