The Graduate Association for Food Studies is pleased to announce the third annual Future of Food Studies graduate student conference, to be held 4–6 October 2018, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Additionally, a select number of papers will be considered for publication in the Graduate Journal of Food Studies, a peer-reviewed graduate journal for food-related research. Below you will find the Call for Papers; please feel free to distribute to any and all graduate students who you think may be interested.
Thanks to generous funding from the Association for the Study of Food and Society and our other sponsors, modest support may be available in some cases to partially subsidize travel expenses of some conference participants. We will consider all applications and candidates fully, although those traveling from afar will take precedence in the allotment of funds.
Food studies has arrived. It is hard to imagine that two decades ago, scholars seriously considered food only in a few disciplines, usually at the margins. As food studies has exploded across disciplines, the field now boasts its own professional associations, journals, and undergraduate and graduate programs at institutions around the world. In addition, the past decade has seen a surge of public interest in food, from food trucks to urban farming to Chef’s Table—even as food security remains unattainable or elusive for billions of people. Food has never been more relevant to academic inquiry.
As food studies has risen to prominence, scholars have emphasized that that food can be used as a lens to examine nearly any topic. Yet, it is clear that food studies must grapple with many questions, including questions about the field’s own identity. With food studies becoming increasingly institutionalized, how will the discipline continue to evolve? What new subjects, methods, or theories will reshape the study of food in coming years? What areas of food culture and politics urgently need academic attention? And how can the discipline stay relevant when public interest in food inevitably wanes? Emerging scholars at the forefront of the discipline offer exciting answers to these questions.
This conference seeks graduate scholarship that presents original approaches to food studies, whether applying creative theories and methods to established questions or subjects, or interrogating unconsidered topics in novel ways. As food studies is a fundamentally interdisciplinary subject of study, GAFS welcomes papers from the fields of anthropology, history, sociology, English, cultural studies, American studies, gender studies, economics, art, politics, pedagogy, nutrition, the natural sciences, philosophy, religion, and beyond. GAFS hopes to assemble graduate students across disciplines and locales.
Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
- food and critical identity studies;
- food, media, and representation;
- food, eating, and critical race theory;
- the ethics of terroir and sustainability;
- agriculture and agrarian change in the Anthropocene;
- food and medicine;
- food, materiality, and critical animal studies;
- food, affect, and performance studies;
- innovation across the food system;
- food and the body;
- food sovereignty and food insecurity;
- the politics of public health and nutrition;
- emergent culinary and agricultural diaspora(s);
- food and value;
- food, agriculture, and empire;
- food history.
Abstract Details
Proposals (papers or full panels) should be submitted by 20 July 2018, and must include an abstract (250 words) and a biographical statement (100 words).
We welcome proposals for panels of up to three presentations. For panels, speakers must send in their own proposals and indicate the names of the other speakers with whom they intend to present. Panel proposals submitted without all three speakers’ individual proposals will not be accepted. Only proposals from graduate students will be considered. Select papers will also be published in a conference proceedings edition of the Graduate Journal of Food Studies.
Extended Deadline for proposals: 20 July 2018
gradfoodstudies.org 