What, when & where
Food Matters and Materialities: Critical Understandings of Food Cultures
Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada
May 6 and 7, 2021
Food cultures are developed and enacted through a web of social and cultural relationships that produce food matters and knowledge, and food-related practices. Works emerging from critical food studies have demonstrated how uneven power relationships take form within these food cultures and create unfair and unequal relationships to and through food (ex., Carolan, 2016; Koc̦ et al., 2012; Slocum & Saldanha, 2016). These power relationships materialize in particular food matters, or materialities (as inspired by new materialisms), and in the elaboration of a wide range of food-related practices, such as food production and harvesting, circulation, preparation, control, and consumption.
Current food cultures are permeated by worries that concern food production and consumption, environment and human health. We conceive that these concerns and issues, and the solutions proposed to address them, are part of (as much as they are the result of) the knowledge and power relationships at play in our current food cultures. Inspired by Stacy Alaimo and Susan J. Hekman’s 2008 call for the consideration of materialities, we contend that social sciences and humanities are crucial to think about and with food matters/materialities so as to engage with positivist sciences such as dietetics, medicine, biology and biochemistry, engineering, etc., all of which produce and address food-related issues and as such, participate in (trans)forming food matters and cultures.
We are interested in questioning the emergence of food matters/materialities and the heterogenous networks and power relationships they are embedded in and that they contribute to (re)producing. The Conference’s theme revolves around “matters”, to reflect our will to address how food matters/materialities emerge in and engage with particular food cultures.
Papers could question how food matters/materialities are produced, harvested, controlled, distributed, circulated, wasted, consumed, commercialized, and tested, and how all of these practices are tied to particular food cultures and particular food knowledge. They could also address how food matters/materialities come to matter, and contribute to the creation of as much as they are embedded in power related issues and relationships. For example, papers could work at re-complexifying how we understand the relationships between food, environment and health, so as to question how they are the resulting materialization of unequal power dynamics. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
Food matters/materialities
Food production and consumption
Food and social inequalities
Food cultures and foodways
Food and climate change, and/or biodiversity changes, and/or Anthropocene
Food and environment
Food and sustainability
Food and activism
Critical perspective on food diet(s) and nutrition/nutritionism
Food and bodies
Food and non-human/more-than-human
Food and human/more-than-human geographies
Food and health, and/or food and health/disease risks assessment and management
Food and gender, race, age, class, disability, or approached through intersectionality
Deadline & how to apply
Abstracts of 300-500 words or queries can be submitted by June 10, 2020 to myriamdurocher@cunet.carleton.ca
Full papers will be due by April 7, 2021.
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