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.