Call for Papers
Special issue for Locale: The Australasian-Pacific Journal of Regional Food Studies
Food Pedagogies and the Senses
Guest Editors:
Rick Flowers, University of Technology Sydney and
Elaine Swan, University of Sussex
In this call, we seek papers that offer analyses of the sensory politics of food pedagogies. Papers should have a local, national or regional focus on the Pacific Rim across Asia, Oceania, North and South America, which can include intersections with global and diasporic perspectives. By food pedagogies, we refer to attempts by a range of agencies, actors, institutions and media to ‘teach’ about growing, shopping, cooking, eating, and wasting food (Flowers and Swan 2015; Leahy and Pike 2015; Etmanski 2015; Sumner 2013). By teach, we mean various processes of formal, informal and incidental education and learning, inside and beyond the classroom. Examples of formal food pedagogies include cooking courses, health education, nutrition workshops, culinary tours, and permaculture courses; informal food pedagogies encompass museum food exhibitions, TV cooking shows, community gardening projects, food activist campaigns, food industry marketing public health programmes; and incidental food pedagogies cover learning from eating and drinking, at work, at home, in restaurants, and large-scale food events. Thus, food pedagogues can include museum curators, health workers, food tour guides, nutritionists, teachers, food activists, food producers and retailers, celebrity chefs and celebrity farmers. Our definition draws from Australian and American scholars who use pedagogy as an analytic to study cultural and social processes and relations which attempt to modify how we act, feel and think (Luke 1996; Sandlin, O’Malley and Burdick 2011; Watkins, Noble and Driscoll 2015). In essence, ‘culture can and does operate in pedagogical ways’ (Hickey-Moody, Savage and Windle 2010, p. 227). This means examining the pedagogical dimensions of processes such as socialisation, reproduction, interpellation, embodiment and analysing how forms of food subjectivity and food conduct are capacitated, regulated and shaped in gendered, racialised, heternormative and classed ways across public, private and domestic spheres (Watkins et al., 2015; Luke 1996).