Coffee Break
Coffee Break seeks to promote disruptive thinking about “good coffee” by bringing coffee drinkers into conversations with coffee farmers, roasters, baristas, and one another in order to re-imagine forms of hospitality rooted in sustainability and justice, not connoisseurship.
Coffee drinking is associated with hospitality around the world, yet producing coffee is not always hospitable to biodiversity, the millions of small-scale coffee farmers, or the migrant laborers who harvest coffee. The Coffee Break project will use coffee and its myriad associations with hospitality as a means to encourage diverse people to enter into generative, self-reflective conversations about coffee, capitalism, and their consequences.
These conversations will take place in an undergraduate course Coffee and Capitalism, in local coffee roasting businesses, in pop-up coffee shops, and possibly on coffee farms in Latin America.
Project Director
John Soluri
Associate Professor
Department of History