Photo: Elspeth celebrated with the newly minted Dr Leung over a Dark ’n Stormy— her love Sarah’s favourite—The Redfern, Sydney, 18 June 2021.
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A memorial tribute by her student, Daren Shi-Chi Leung
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Elspeth thought with feeling. She could bring life to the most ordinary subjects—human and non-human—and make them throb with consequence. As an activist, I was long drawn to “alternatives” that might change the world. I once excitedly presented niche food practices from my fieldwork. “What would your mother think?” Elspeth asked, knowing my mum would never buy those expensive tomatoes. The question was simple and devastatingly precise. It sent me back to my mother’s history—a woman who survived socialist China while carrying deep knowledge of what we now call organic farming. That was the turn. I began to ask how we might feed the People. Thinking with Elspeth, listening to my mother—these reoriented my work toward food, environment, and even human shit.
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Waiting outside Elspeth’s office for our fortnightly supervisions, I always felt that bright, nervous current. The nerves would move with her, glasses on and off, as she read every sentence of my drafts. Together we refined arguments, wrestled with ideas, and found our way through tears (usually mine) and laughter. Her students called her “EP”—a name carrying both respect and intimacy. She demanded our best in writing and thinking, and she matched it with unflagging generosity. She seized every chance to champion her students; none of us remained hidden gems for long.
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I first learned of Elspeth through John Erni, my undergraduate and MPhil supervisor, her close friend since their PhD days with Lawrence Grossberg. We met in Hong Kong in 2015, when John invited her as a keynote. We walked through Occupied Central, and our conversation left me steadied and inspired. Later, when I wrote to ask if she would supervise my PhD, her immediate “yes” felt unreal. I was over the moon—later, some shrinking in the water was necessary. The Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney gave me a community of care, rigour, and inspiration. It was also home to Meaghan Morris, “guru” to many of us, a founding member of Lingnan’s Cultural Studies programme, and the figure who drew me to the 2014 IACS summer school. When I returned to Lingnan as faculty in 2021, I discovered Elspeth had already been there for the Crossroads Conference in 2010. So it goes. My fortune in becoming Elspeth’s student is an embodiment of these intertwined histories—made possible by those whose work and generosity knit our worlds together. For this, I am eternally grateful.
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Thinking with Elspeth. Elspeth’s scholarship moved like a tide across her books, returning again and again with new light on foundational questions. Her writing sustained an inquiry into queering bodies, food, affect, and—most recently—the ocean; from Cultural Studies, her influence has travelled into sociology, human geography, and so on. As she liked to say, “food really was good to think with.” It wasn’t only food. It was her way of attending to everyday mundaneness until it became something we could not ignore.
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Her work is still too little known in Asia. Is it because she did not take “Asia” as an object? Or because, through her eyes, the watery world necessarily exceeds a regional frame? As her student, sharing her interests in food, waste, and ecology, I honour Elspeth’s contribution and try to draw lines between her thought of wetness and the IACS community—where many of us attend to capitalist extractivism, colonial pollution, and local struggles with and for the ocean.
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The “local,” for Elspeth, wasn’t simply activist ethics but the very specificity that makes complexity visible—the condition of possibility, the Foucauldian 101, as she taught me. In Eating the Ocean (2016), her beautiful queering of the seas works through relations among humans, fish, and ocean: critiquing land-based food politics, shifting attention offshore to examine material complicities, and theorising embodied practices of entanglement that bring stories, histories, and geographies together in unexpected, sometimes clashing ways. In this she inhabits what she, as a wet ethnographer, calls an “otherworldly space” of human–fish–ocean relations.
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As she writes: “Histories of people are written into the water. As Raymond Williams would say, people live the relatedness, just as they live their ‘culture [as] ordinary.’ As a wet ethnographer, who dredges oceanic tales, I tease out connections and relate them… As much as I can, I try to inhabit these relations, to make these acts of relating fleshy and fishy” (14).
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Leading this oceanic turn, Elspeth’s spirit of queering, relating, and inhabiting invites us to complicate the local–global politics we inherit, through concepts she called tools rather than theory: “necessary complexity,” “ethologies of the more-than-human,” and “gender and queer fish relations.” These resonate with IACS inquiries. Though not Asia-focused, her work enriches inter-Asian dialogue precisely because many localities live with the ocean more thickly than theory can tell: Haenyeo divers in South Korea; ongoing whaling in Japan; high-seas fishing in Taiwan; deep-sea mining in China; island tourism and conservation in Thailand and the Philippines. These struggles—ecological, geopolitical, affective—make an oceanic lens urgent.
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If Asia as Method (2010) is captured in Chen Kuan-Hsing’s line, “the more I go to Seoul, the better I understand Taipei,” then for Elspeth, studying the oceanic conjuncture—historical, material, geographical, geopolitical—means shifting our reference points by following fish across tangible and intangible borders: “Fish sold in London’s Billingsgate Market come from all over the world and are sold by buyers whose forebears were subjugated as part of the British colonial enterprise” (19). To move with the currents of more-than-human politics—where we feel, think, and act otherwise—is to take up Elspeth’s question: “Can we eat with the ocean?”
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Teaching with Elspeth. In autumn 2024, I taught a new course on food and environment in which Elspeth appeared on half the reading list. Knowing this, she was both flattered and worried about my students’ “digestion.” Reading EP is not easy, even for postgraduates, as we lift off from pro-identity politics into more-than-human entanglement. Her essay “Eating Roos” unsettled my Chinese students; together we chewed through colonial history, animal activism, and Indigenous culture—precisely where ethics, relations, and actions begin. I want to nurture students with an appetite as queer as Elspeth’s. She ate kangaroo, camel, sea snails, trash fish, even chicken wing tips—and so she thought differently about foods many turn away from while industrial capitalism intensifies.
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In our last video call, she offered to attend my lecture online and answer questions from her student’s students. She simply wanted to chat with them. My students were more nervous than I was to meet “the theorist” live. I believe Elspeth would have felt the joy and fulfilment they found learning about food—from tasting to farming to cooking—in Cultural Studies’ broad, worldly classroom.
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Though Elspeth is no longer physically with us, I feel her presence every time I enter a classroom. If food is always good to think with, then so was Elspeth’s pedagogy—and so is the responsibility I now carry to nurture the next generation. Teaching her work is not just transmitting knowledge; it is keeping a conversation alive, keeping scholarship fleshy, fishy, and deeply relational. She remains my teacher, even as I become theirs.
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A living legacy is a continuing conversation. “When do you introduce me to the Chinese world?” Elspeth joked, glass of Prosecco in hand, at a farewell marking my departure. And here we are. Thanks to Typesetter Publishing in Hong Kong, a translation team—Kris Chi, Dongyang Li, and I—has formed to bring Eating the Ocean into Chinese. We will crowdfund to make it truly collective.
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This translation continues Elspeth’s work of connecting ideas and communities across boundaries. Her oceanic thinking—attuned to flows and unexpected encounters—belongs in Chinese-speaking conversations. Her influence lives on in the networks she cultivated: students who became collaborators, colleagues who became co-thinkers, and those who found new ways of relating to the world through her work. Let scholarship flow beyond institutional banks, as she believed, making new possibilities for thinking and relating across difference.
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Elspeth’s call remains with us: how can we eat with the ocean? The answer continues to unfold through each new reader, each new conversation, each new connection we make—guided by her luminous spirit.