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Call for Papers
Session: Emotional Geographies of Food Justice
Fourth International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Emotional
Geographies (July 1 to 3, 2013 at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands)
Session Organizers: Pascale Joassart-Marcelli and Fernando Bosco,
Department of Geography, San Diego State University
Abstract
In recent years, food has become a major focus of attention in western post-industrial nations. In that context, many environmentalists, foodies, health experts, growers and community activists have embraced the idea of food justice, which seeks to promote equal access to healthy, sustainable, affordable, and culturally appropriate food. Yet, because the concept is based on universal and material understandings of rights as well as essentialized notions of food and health, it tends to ignore the subjective and emotional relationships that people have with food. As a result, efforts to foster food justice have occurred primarily through the marketplace: expanding organic and healthy food options, improving access to grocery stores, subsidizing the cost of “good” food through vouchers, and reducing the distance between farms and forks through various new forms of distribution (e.g., CSA, farmers’ markets, farm-to-school programs). A disproportionately smaller number of initiatives have focused on circumventing the market through collective approaches to growing food and allocating resources. In brief, whether conceived as within or against the capitalist economy, food justice has almost entirely been defined in terms of physical accessibility to “good" food.
This session examines the emotional and affective relationships between people and food and their implications for a broader understanding of food justice. For example, the gendered and racialized nature of food work, the embodiment of food injustices, the viscerality of food, its importance in place-making, especially for transnational and marginalized communities, and its role in the production of memory, all draw attention to the emotional and affective qualities of food and beg for a more critical engagement with the concept of food justice.
We seek papers that explore the
emotional geographies of food and their implications for a better understanding
of food justice and how we may foster it. We welcome
papers from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives, including
those focusing on the following topics:
- the emotional labor of growing and preparing food
- food practices and resistance
production and affirmation of difference in food practices
- race and its embodiment in/through food
- food and place-making in transnational
communities
- food, nostalgia and memory
- different understandings of justice as it
relates to food
Please submit a brief abstract of your paper to Fernando Bosco ([log in to unmask]) AND Pascale Joassart-Marcelli ([log in to unmask]) no later than 14th December 2012. Feel free to email any questions.