Who Paid For My Coffee?!

Join us this January for a lecture that takes something ordinary—your daily cup of coffee—and reveals the hidden systems that shape who benefits, who labours, and who bears the cost.

About the Lecture

Coffee feels simple. Comforting. Almost innocent. But behind every cup lies a dense web of labour, land, history, and power, most of it invisible to the consumer.

This unLecture uses coffee as a lens to think through larger questions in food ethics. Rather than focusing on taste or price, the session asks what ethical responsibility looks like within global food systems shaped by colonial legacies, industrial production, and unequal valuation of work.

The session does not offer prescriptions or guilt-driven conclusions. Instead, it creates space to notice, question, and sit with discomfort, asking what it really means to consume ethically in a deeply unequal world.

About the Lecturer

Shivani Sharma is a researcher and educator working at the intersection of philosophy, food ethics, and political ecology. She holds a doctorate in the ethics of food commodification, with research examining how industrial food systems affect nutrition, biodiversity, labour, and animal welfare.

Over the last decade, she has conducted research at the University of Delhi, worked with Vandana Shiva’s Navdanya Trust on the Anna Swaraj food sovereignty movement, and taught philosophy at Ashoka University. She is currently exploring autoethnography as a research method and has presented her research at the University of Oxford.

PS: Your ticket includes a 250/- coupon for a beverage or snack at the venue.

About unLecture

unLecture brings experts out of classrooms and into cafés, bars and neighbourhood spaces across Delhi. Created by three friends from St. Stephen’s, Delhi who wanted learning to feel warm, social and alive. unLecture turns an ordinary evening into a conversation you’ll think about long after it ends.