Constructing and Defining Food Practices
The Food Project

Tuesday 15th September - Thursday 17th September 2015
Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

Call for Presentations:
Food and consumption are, undeniably, enmeshed in all aspects of human existence. Our history and culture, as well as our economic and social circumstances, determine and reflect our relationship with food, cuisine, food-ways, and food practices. The Making Sense of Food Project seeks to foster inter-disciplinary dialogue about the way in which meaning is constructed and negotiated via food and the myriad ways in which such is expressed. In particular, we seek to explore and investigate a core set of questions around the meaning of food itself and what we might describe as food practices (itself an idea to be explored and defined during the course of the meeting):

- What does food mean and symbolize? How is that meaning created? How is that meaning communicated?

- How are food practices defined, shaped, delineated, modified, resisted, reinvented, etc.? By whom? For whom?

Food as a global activity requires an integrated approach for its understanding. As such, FOOD4 is inviting presentations from different disciplines and approaches that would enhance the interdisciplinary nature of the topic. The proposed presentations should serve as the beginning of an ongoing dynamic dialogue, with the ultimate goal of moving beyond the limits of the conference itself in order to assist communities in substantive ways. With this spirit in mind, presentations, papers, performances, works-in-progress, and/or workshop proposals for FOOD4 are invited to address issues related to any of the following areas (or combination of them):

- Appetites (connection between food and starvations, sex, desire, hunger, etc.)
- Place and space (private vs public eating, formal vs informal food movements, etc)
- Authenticity (traditional vs new, cycles or trends, etc.)
- Globalization (conquest and contemporary, exchange, standardization, food products all over)
- Ability of language to capture, or not, multi-sensorial nature of the food experience
- Food activism (social changes, resistance, reactions, solutions, etc.) and creating food literacy
- Food practices (diets, vegetarianism, food fads, ritual foods, etc.)
- Teaching of food (food literacy, food history, food and identity, etc.)
- Food as identifier (collectively, regionally, religiously, etc.)
- Food in the 21st century (as it intersects with the advent of social media, immigration, globalization, etc.)
- Food and technology (GMOs, scientific testing of "good" and "bad" foods, additives, etc.)
- Food and economics (connection between food and class, food policies, subsidies, etc.)

What to Send:
300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 1st May 2015. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 10th July 2015. Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation as you would like it to appear in programme, c) email address, d) title of proposal, e) body of proposal, f) up to 10 keywords.
E-mails should be entitled: FOOD4 Abstract Submission.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs:
Nina Namaste: آدرس ایمیل جهت جلوگیری از رباتهای هرزنامه محافظت شده اند، جهت مشاهده آنها شما نیاز به فعال ساختن جاوا اسكریپت دارید
Rob Fisher: آدرس ایمیل جهت جلوگیری از رباتهای هرزنامه محافظت شده اند، جهت مشاهده آنها شما نیاز به فعال ساختن جاوا اسكریپت دارید

The conference is part of the Making Sense of: programme of research projects. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All proposals accepted for and presented at the conference must be in English and will be eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected proposals may be developed for publication in a themed hard copy volume(s). All publications from the conference will require editors, to be chosen from interested delegates from the conference.

Inter-Disciplinary.Net believes it is a mark of personal courtesy and professional respect to your colleagues that all delegates should attend for the full duration of the meeting. If you are unable to make this commitment, please do not submit an abstract for presentation.

For further details of the conference, please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/making-sense-of/food/call-for-presentations/

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.

Join IAFOR in the vibrant city of Kobe, Japan, from November 5-7, for the Asian Conference on Technology, Information and Society 2015. Explore the conference theme of "Power" in an international, intercultural and interdisciplinary setting.

Submit an Abstract: http://iafor.org/cfp
Enquiries: آدرس ایمیل جهت جلوگیری از رباتهای هرزنامه محافظت شده اند، جهت مشاهده آنها شما نیاز به فعال ساختن جاوا اسكریپت دارید
Web address: http://iafor.org/iafor/conferences/actis2015/

ACTIS 2015 Conference Theme: "Power"

Power as a commodity has challenged the minds of social scientists and philosophers while its exercise has always fascinated historians. From classical thinkers' works such as Aristotle's Politka or Machiavelli's Il Principe through modern figures who manipulate power in the media, like Silvio Berlusconi or Rupert Murdoch, to the vast networks that support major heads of state, power has been a necessity to some or like an aphrodisiac to others. The dynamics of power and its associations with wealth and status now shape the contemporary world more visibly than ever. It is a research challenge to all fields in the academy to offer some explanation of its magnetism and its mechanisms.

The era of Big Data has created great change and opportunity. It has allowed us to make more and more information accessible, and to catalogue and archive, as well as communicate more freely. However, the era of Big Data has ushered in an era of Big Brother. New technologies have facilitated such resistance movements as those in Hong Kong, but have also empowered governments to unparalleled levels of surveillance and breaches of privacy. In the context of this conference, the ambiguous concept of power will encourage reflections on questions of rights, responsibilities, and trust, as well as hegemony, ownership, and resistance; control, transparency and censorship. Similarly we expect to see explorations of the relationships of power between individuals, corporations and governments, as issues of privacy, surveillance, and freedom of information test these.

As a conference theme, power in its many aspects is a hub concept that researchers, analysts, and practitioners alike can reflect on and speak about both in the abstract and from experience. Power and its perception can therefore be an invaluable concept in the exploration of the globalization of corporations, and we expect this theme to excite a number of stimulating research paths.

We look forward to their outcomes as we gather in Kobe in 2015.

Professor Jerry Platt
ACTIS2015 International Director of Program

Conference Theme and Streams

The conference theme for ACTIS2015 is "Power", and the organizers encourage submissions that approach this theme from a variety of perspectives. However, the submission of other topics for consideration is welcome and we also encourage sessions within and across a variety of interdisciplinary and theoretical perspectives.

Submissions are organized into the following thematic streams:

- Transformation through information
- Mining and minding our interconnected world
- Sensors, texts, and other sources of data
- New realities through artificial intelligence
- Social aspects of mobile technology
- Web scraping and crowd-sourcing
- The data-enriched society
- Social media and communities
- Open-source initiatives
- Privacy, security and ethics