Food, Embodiment, and Knowledge
Type: Call for Papers
Date: May 19, 2016 to November 1, 2016
Location: Canada
Subject Fields: Theatre & Performance History / Studies
Food
studies has emerged as a powerful disruption of dominant discourses
about how we grow, distribute, make, consume, and waste food. The
inter-disciplinary nature of food studies welcomes cross-boundary
discussions that question hegemonic discourses and that produce the
potential for imaginative interventions into current epistemologies and practices. [1]And
yet, this discussion largely happens within the realm of the text,
either through journals, books, archives, and conference proceedings.
Visual media has also formed a bulk of knowledge production and
transmission within the field.
But growing, preparing, and consuming food are themselves, as Lisa Heldke makes clear, “knowing” activities (212).[2]
Hands, muscles, ears, tongues, noses, and fingers are combined sites
where knowledge resides. And if these embodied practices are indeed
“thoughtful,” what might we say about those thoughts that may only be
expressed in the food we grow, make, and consume, rather than in the
words we speak and write? How can we seek to facilitate knowledge
construction about those aspects of individual perceptions of food that
cannot be easily expressed in discursive statements or that cannot be
expressed at all, but, that are nevertheless deeply felt at the limits
of what can be thought and fashioned? How can food studies embody food
knowledge differently? What alternative ways can food, as Virginie
Magnat asks, “legitimize embodied knowledge as a counter-hegemonic mode
of inquiry”[3]? What can the text NOT do that embodied practices can?
We begin this special issue of In/Tensions from Diana Taylor’s important work The Archive and the Repertoire
(2003), which illuminates the relationship between the body and the
archive of documents as one of colonial and hegemonic power distributed
over indigenous bodies and cultures. We invite considerations of
embodied explorations of food (and) knowledge. How might planting
community gardens, performance and art creation, labor, consumption
create and pass on knowledge? How might these modes of experience and
learning become powerful forces for change in personal, community, and
policy construction?
A multi-media journal, and aware as we are of
the performative limits and possibilities of this format, we invite
papers, performances, slide shows, videos, and art works that engage
with ideas of embodied food-knowledge production. We welcome and
encourage challenges to standard modes of academic and food production
and consumption, as well as explorations of the limits of both
embodiment and the text’s ability to represent food knowledge.
Topics might include:
- Imaginative and experimental ethnographic methods and their potential for food studies
- Performance and art installations
- Gardening as embodied practice
- Canning and Preserving as embodiments of time and community
- Indigenous food systems and practices
- The affective economy of food
- The cultures of ‘the table’
- Fast food and slow food
- Consumer ‘taste’
- Alternative food movements
- Food sociability
- Food and memory
- Food and tradition, ritual and cultural performance
- Food and migration
- Food and knowledge making
- Foodways and transnationalism
- Embodied research practices
- Food labour and livelihood
- Culinary Education as Embodied Practice.