You are here:

This archive will house material posted on the website that has become out of date.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS (February 2008)
[now closed, April 2008]

Ken Albala and Trudy Eden are seeking proposals for a new collection of essays entitled Food and Faith: Consumption in the Christian Tradition, 1500 to the Present. This volume will explore how traditional or innovative dietary practices or food habits have expressed the Christian faith on both sides of the Atlantic. We would like the chapters in this volume to cover but not necessarily be limited to the ways Christian adherents have

• sought to define their faith with their food prohibitions or culinary traditions,
• bound themselves together as adherents by using food symbolically or functionally,
• used food as an outward expression of their inward religiosity,
• used food to facilitate the Christian faith in themselves or others on philosophical, social, bodily and/or psychological levels.

We invite submissions from various disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and comparative perspectives, focusing on individuals, single sects, or groups. If you are interested in contributing to this volume, please send your c.v and a 250-500 word abstract of your proposed chapter including your theoretical framework and your primary sources to Trudy.Eden@uni.edu and Kalbala@pacific.edu by April 1, 2008.

Recently Held Conferences

The Second Annual

International Conference on Quantitative Gastronomy

Sponsored by the Society of Quantitative Gastronomy (SQG), will be held on
May 24-25, 2007, in Trier, Germany. The conference is co-organized with the
Vineyard Data Quantification Society (VDQS) and the American Association of
Wine Economists. Our objective is to bring together academic researchers and
professionals to spend a two-day meeting, presenting, and discussing
research (round table) on all topics related to gastronomy.

The conference website, http://www.gastronometrica.org,

10th - 13th April 2007, London Metropolitan University, UK

Thinking Through Tourism

[Website]

From the website:
"This conference will mark over three decades of anthropological work on tourism and tourism-related issues. It will combine reflections on the evolution of anthropological interest in the subject, on where the subject stands presently, and on the various directions in which it may be going. Possible panels will include the ethnography of tourism; the kinship between tourism, anthropology and epistemology; images and objects; tourism and the body; tourism policy and planning; anthropological approaches to museums; anthropology and the global political-economy of tourism; anthropology and regional development; anthropology, tourism and borderlands; and tourism and nationalism. It will be held at London Metropolitan University.

The conference will start at midday on Tuesday 10th April 2007 and finish in the early afternoon of the 13th. Days will be divided into morning and afternoon sessions of approximately three hours duration. The conference will open on Tuesday afternoon with an extended plenary session. Morning sessions will consist of a 90-minute plenary, followed by 90-minute parallel workshops. The afternoons of days two and three will be devoted to further parallel sessions, with time between lunchtime and 4pm on Thursday for network and business meetings. The conference will close at lunchtime on Friday. There will be three plenary and seven parallel sessions over the four days of the conference."

See Website for more details/contacts, etc

________________________________________________________

Journal Special Issue: Text and Performance Quarterly

Food and Performance, Food as Performance

(Deadline passed) 

Edited by Myron Beasley, Department of Communication, Depaul University. 2723 N. Kenmore. Chicago, IL 60614

Kristin Langellier, Communication and Journalism, University of Maine, Orono ME 04469, USA, 207-581-1942.

 Laura Lindenfeld, Communication and Journalism, University of Maine, Orono, ME 04469, USA, 207-581-3850, Laura Lindenfeld@umit.maine.edu.

The multidisciplinary field of Food Studies explores relationships among food, culture, and society. Drawing on diverse theoretical and methodological approaches, scholars have produced significant new research over the past two decades ranging from everyday food practices, the gendering of feeding families, and the phenomenon of food television to the relationship of food to nationhood.

Performance studies has much to offer to contemporary food studies, and this special issue will encourage and highlight the relationship between food and performance, and food as performance. We encourage essays that will attend to food as a complex system of performance practices and epistemologies. We are particularly interested in essays that consider the performative and aesthetic aspects of food that also incorporates the "mixings" of race, class, power, sex, and sexuality with politics, history, and contemporary performance culture. Such topics could include but are not limited to food as narrative, the performance of cooking, eating as ritual, and consumption and sex. Manuscripts from a wide range of interdisciplinary, theoretical, and methodological perspectives, including rhetorical, feminist, ethnographic, performative writing, psychoanalytic, and historical, are encouraged.
______________________________________________________

The European Institute for the History and Culture of Food: 2008 Colloquium

Information and Food Practices

Tours (Loire Valley), France, March 28 & 29, 2008.

(deadline passed)

Official languages of the colloquium are French and English.

The 250 to 300-word proposals, based on original, recent research, headed by a working title, should be sent by email to the EIFHC secretariat (ieha@wanadoo.fr) and to Eva Barlösius (eva.barloesius@uni-due.de), Martin Bruegel (Martin.Bruegel@ivry.inra.fr), Catherine Grandjean
(Catherine.Grandjean2@wanadoo.fr) and Marilyn Nicoud (dirma@efrome.it).

A selection of the contributions will be published. Scientific coordination : Eva Barlösius (Universität Duisburg-Essen), Martin Bruegel (INRA-CORELA), Catherine Grandjean (Université de
Tours) and Marilyn Nicoud (École française de Rome/ENS-LSH) with the help of the EIFHC Scientific Advisory Board.

Deadline to submit proposals : February 15, 2007

Selection of communications : April 15, 2007

INFORMATION AND FOOD PRACTICES

How do individual as well as institutional consumers find their bearings in the profusion of often conflicting information relating to food ? Indeed, human nourishment lends itself to a wide variety of descriptions and classifications. Certain approaches highlight products and their attributes, others emphasize food practices from the choice of comestibles to their preparation and their combination, others again integrate considerations of food and foodways to embrace life's hygiene in general. Who – when, where and why – is susceptible to respond to such information, and how does it affect alimentary behavior and everyday life ?

The board of advisers of the EIFHC has chosen "Information and food practices" as the theme of its colloquium to be held in March 2008 in order to encourage social science research on the ways in which consumers receive, appropriate, evaluate and (maybe) put such information into practice.

Among the several venues of research inviting exploration are :

1) Information hierarchies : Sanitary advice, dietary prescriptions, nutritional recommendations, taste evaluations, quality credentials, culinary advice but also advertising claims matter to food practices. They probably matter according to the legitimacy consumers attribute to the producers of information (medical professions, public authorities, industrialists, masters of protocol, …); the identification of such experts and the inventory of their discourses not only help to specify historical and geographic contexts, but also offer clues to learn how and according to what criteria consumers sort, rank and achieve working compromises on the basis of the often competing kinds of information to which they have access or are exposed. In short, the goal is to describe and analyze the constitution of knowledge about food and to uncover the factors that prompt or prevent modification of such knowledge.

2) Locating information, identifying the channels of diffusion : How, and for what reason, do people search for information on products, their characteristics, their uses ? Access to information, whether by way of the media, health professionals, school etc., may be costly and is more often than not unequal. One way to differentiate consumer experiences is to retrieve their sources of information, whether time-honored or the internet, to analyze the impact of both form and content. Maybe the "implied" consumer offers a key to the real information user.

3) Information, production and markets : Information helps shape the supply that consumers encounter. It may stimulate or stop productive activities – in niche markets or fashion and fads. It conditions, through collective representations, the perception of what is healthy or good or desirable to eat (as opposed to what is not). A diachronic perspective is likely to shed light on the timing, the ways and the scope in which markets, producers and commercial intermediaries have responded to qualitative information: how did they exchange information to increase its efficacy or to sabotage it ? It would be equally exciting to learn more about the reactions of consumers, intermediaries and their associations to product classifications and to product certifications, to learn about successful as well as failed attempts "to inform" and maybe to inculcate (just as consumption taxes tend to provoke dissatisfaction).

4) Pertinence and practice : The appropriation of information to shape and guide food practices takes time. But just how much ? What does it take to achieve "pertinence" or even urgency in whose mind ? Are there differences between various types of information ? Rhythms and itineraries of recommendations, tenacity of habits and beliefs, thresholds and nature of resistance, in short the opposition between tradition and novation offers ample matter to investigate the encounter of information with, and its effects on, food practices.

5) Matching messages and consumers : The identification of knowledge about food, the location of groups that hold this knowledge as opposed to those that lack it, provide an angle on the success or the failure of public policy efforts to influence dietary habits. Who is sought out to receive information, and how do individuals or groups respond to it ? What are the objective as well as the subjective characteristics of groups targeted by messages related to food, what are the motives that convince people to endow information with relevance and to translate it into their daily modus operandi?

The call for papers goes to researchers in the humanities and the social sciences : Historians (all eras, Europe and confines), of course, but colleagues hailing from economics, sociology, anthropology, archaeology are welcome to submit proposals attentive to time and timing in the meeting of information and food practices.

________________________________________________________

Call for Papers

27th February - 1 March, 2008

Lisbon, Portugal

European Social Science History Conference:

Food, court cultures and the world since 1850.

The ESSHC 2008 will take place in Lisbon, Portugal at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon, from Wednesday 27 February up to and including Saturday 1 March 2008.Conference Call for Papers There are two new networks: Material and Consumer Culture and Politics, Nations, Nationalism (a merger of the Politics and Nations and Nationalism networks) Chair and discussant pool. On the registration form there is now the possibility to volunteer as chair and or discussant for selected networks. After the pre-registration you will receive a log-in and password. You can log on to your personal page with this log-in and password. The personal page shows all your registration information and a log of the e-mails we have sent to date. A short report and some pictures of the ESSHC 2006 in Amsterdam are available.

The ESSHC [website] aims at bringing together scholars interested in explaining historical phenomena using the methods of the social sciences. The conference is characterized by a lively exchange in many small groups, rather than by formal plenary sessions. Teh conference is organized in a large number of networks which cover a variety of topics. It welcomes papers and sessions on any topic and any historical period. See the guidelines for papers and sessions. Read more about the ESSHC and past conferences.

Organisation: The European Social Science History Conference is organised by the International Institute of Social History (IISH), an institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts & Sciences. Information on the IISH is available from its website at http://www.iisg.nl.

Contact:

ESSHC Conference Secretariat c/o International Institute of Social History

Cruquiusweg 31 1019 AT

Amsterdam

The Netherlands

tel: + 31 20 66 858 66 fax: + 31 20 66 541 81

e-mail: esshc@iisg.nl

________________________________________________________

Past Seminars

Food: Production and Consumption

Perth, August 2006

Some excellent international speakers including Peter Barham, Alan Warde and Sidney Mintz will be joining an impressive Australian group of food scholars and practitioners at a symposium entitled Food: production and consumption which begins with a three day excursion in Margaret River, and finishes with a 2-day symposium at UWA in early August.

More information on the University of Western Australia's website: www.ias.uwa.edu.au

Research Centre Seminars

The Globalization of Wine
June 7th, Wednesday
5:00 – 8:30 PM
University of Adelaide, North Terrace
Napier Bldg, G03

Members are invited to the latest seminar hosted by the Research Centre. Guest speaker Rob van Zanten, of Adelaide University’s School of Agriculture, Food and Wine will introduce the evening’s theme: the Globalization of Wine. A discussion and question time will follow before food and wine! (with pairings matched according to variety, country and style).
All welcome. Donation at the door.

A great success! Thanks to all -including chef Leslie Deane and caterer Catherine Kerry- for their efforts and attendance. Report on the screening in the July newsletter.