Ponte en la Cola : Queueing as an Ethnographic Method to Study Food Insecurity

ABSTRACT Food insecurity is not only experienced within space but is also actively shaped by spatial relations. This article argues that understanding the lived experience of food insecurity requires methods that capture this spatial co‐construction. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted in Havana, Cuba, I demonstrate that by employing queueing as an ethnographic method, I made productive use of food queues as spatial–temporal and social spaces through participant observation, yielding detailed insights into the lived experiences of food insecurity. First, I show how, by applying ethnographic queueing, I was able to access a plurality of voices that collectively made sense of their experience of food insecurity, by reflecting on food scarcity and quality, exchanging food coping strategies and expressing shared frustrations. Second, I demonstrate how this collective sense‐making was mediated by the public space in which the queue was set and crossed spatial scales. Through queueing, I therefore learned how experiences of food insecurity serve as a lens for understanding and interpreting broader socio‐political struggles. Given certain conditions, such as the length of queues and varying crowd behaviours across cultural contexts, employing queueing as an ethnographic method to explore the lived experiences of food insecurity could be a promising avenue for data collection for other scholars in the field.