Special Issue: Food and Power

This special issue of Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies focuses on the problematics of food and eating from a range of critical perspectives. We invite contributions that address issues of food and power, knowledge, culture, science and technology, and (de)colonialism.

Editors: Ezekiel Flannery (Purdue University Calumet)
Diana Mincyte (University of Illinois)

Abstract Deadline: April 1, 2008 (800-1000 words)
Send abstracts to Ezekiel Flannery at flannerye@calumet.purdue.edu

All cultures must transform nature or natural materials into subsistence and these transformations involve many socio-cultural processes. Focusing on these processes illuminates inequalities of class, race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and age, among others, which are increasingly global in scope. Food also reveals a culture’s way of knowing and relating to nature, its conceptualization of hygiene, its imperial/colonial experiences, and its national and ethnic identities. In short, the processes surrounding food give insight into a culture’s overall way of living or cosmology. In the modern or modern/colonial regime, the transformation of nature into food also involves a specific configuration of capital, science, technology, and powerful institutions that work together to standardize diets and everyday experiences with food, including the methods and knowledge used to produce it. This in turn has led to the creation of a standardized discourse which is used to speak about food. In addition to the macro-politics, food-related processes also function as a resource for individual protest as well as a community-building space and a ritual for the reaffirmation of group alliances. To take into account the complexities of food and eating, this special issue will focus on food as a series of social processes which highlight the hierarchies within and between human, economic, technological and natural systems.

With this in mind, we invite a critical discussion of what is understood by the term food and how food-related processes can be contextualized politically and ethically. We are interested in articles that move beyond (Northern) political-economy perspectives that often center on food production, consumption and distribution. We strongly encourage submissions that examine experiences, practices, and discourses surrounding food, through which power relations are produced.

In addition to these issues we seek contributions from a wide range of perspectives on the intersection between food, ethics and politics. This includes but is not limited to:

*Food and science
*Food and modernity/coloniality
*Race/ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality and nutritional politics
*Body politics and food
*Hunger and globalization
*Environmental politics and food
*Food and ideological systems
*Food safety/bio-terrorism
*Food industrialization and standardization
*Green marketplaces

Publication Schedule:
Full manuscripts will be due July 1, 2008. Final drafts will be due November 1, 2008. Manuscripts should follow APA style and be no more than 30 pages in length. This special issue of Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies will appear in the first half of 2009.

Cultural Studies--Critical Methodologies is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary quarterly journal published by Sage and devoted to promoting those scholarly traditions in the social sciences and the humanities which are premised on a critical, performance-based cultural studies agenda at the intersection of interpretive theory, critical methodology, culture, media, history, biography and social structure. Visit the web page of the journal @ http://csc.sagepub.com/.