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p>Seeking a third paper and a chair/commentator for a panel addressing potential intersections between food studies and American Studies for the 2008 meeting of the American Studies Association, which will take place in Albuquerque October 16-18. The theme for the conference is "Back Down to the Crossroads: Integrative American Studies in Theory and Practice," and asks participants to imagine American Studies at an intersection between one road that stretches between ethnic studies and trans-national studies and another road running between community intellectual production (especially in social movements) and academic engagement with public projects and community organizations.
This panel is focused more on the first of the two roads--seeking to exemplify and interrogate the potential contributions of food studies to both the study of localized,
particular experiences and the study of transnational flows of people, practices, and products. However, it might also speak to the concerns represented by the second road: how food studies might call attention to subjugated popular knowledges and daily lived experiences and/or make academic research and writing more accessible and relevant to publics outside the traditional reach of the academy.
I'm a graduate student in the Program of American Culture at the University of Michigan, and the paper I'd like to present at ASA is a draft version of a dissertation chapter I'm planning on food tourism that looks at the construction of
national and class identities through cookbooks, cooking shows and travel literature. The panel will also include Nathan Cook, a graduate student from the American Studies
department at Bowling Green, whose research looks at how we can better understand the construction of place (ethnic, regional, heritage, and commercial) through the public use
of food at food festivals in NW Ohio. We welcome papers on anything related to food, culture, and the construction and representation of identity, or papers more self-reflexively focused on the discipline of food studies itself. We would also love to include scholars from disciplines other than American Studies.
Contact me at smargot@umich.edu as soon as possible if 8nterested. Paper abstracts and participant vitas are due to ASA by midnight Jan. 25.
Best wishes and thanks for your consideration,
Margot Finn
Ph.D. Candidate, Program in American Culture
University of Michigan
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