I got hun­gry just think­ing about this CFP.

CALL FOR PAPERS

FOODWAYS: DIASPORIC DINERS, TRANSNATIONAL TABLES AND CULINARY CONNECTIONS

Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, University of Toronto

Please join us for the 2012 Annual Conference of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, University of Toronto

Thursday October 4 – Sunday, October 7, 2012
Abstracts due: March 16, 2012

More infor­ma­tion on the con­fer­ence can be found on the Diasporic Foodways blog

Click here for online sub­mis­sion of abstracts and reg­is­tra­tion. (see below for instructions)

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Description:
This con­fer­ence seeks to address ques­tions sur­round­ing the dynam­ics of the food ‘we’ eat, the ways in which ‘we’ eat, the mean­ing ‘we’ give to eat­ing, and the effect of eat­ing in a transna­tional world. Recognizing that culi­nary cul­ture is cen­tral to dias­poric iden­ti­fi­ca­tions, the focus is on the place of food in the endur­ing habits, rit­u­als, and every­day prac­tices that are col­lec­tively used to pro­duce and sus­tain shared senses of cul­tural iden­tity. Yet even as it does this work, food and the prac­tices of pro­duc­tion, prepa­ra­tion and con­sump­tion that revolve around it, can­not help but be drawn into wider cul­tures and cul­tural pol­i­tics of con­sump­tion increas­ingly grounded in the pur­suit of qual­i­ties of dif­fer­ence, acts of dis­tinc­tion and ques­tions of jus­tice. This focus on food, cook­ing, and eat­ing in dias­pora and its role in con­nect­ing and chang­ing peo­ples, places, tastes, and sen­si­bil­i­ties around the world yields insight not only to sub­stances that peo­ple con­sider essen­tial to the main­te­nance of iden­tity, but to the pro­duc­tion of new cul­tural polit­i­cal for­ma­tions in a transna­tional world and to the role of cul­tural (re)production in the expan­sion of con­sump­tion under con­tem­po­rary cap­i­tal­ism. A focus on food also reveals the dynamic role of his­tor­i­cal path­ways in under­stand­ing cul­tural for­ma­tions as they have existed through time, and in posi­tion­ing the present as a moment in a con­tin­u­ing process of struc­tured mobil­ity that directs the move­ment of peo­ple, what they eat, and how they under­stand them­selves and the world around them. It also yields insight into the mul­ti­ple places and ways in which food assumes value and how that value is often reliant upon the con­tin­ued repro­duc­tion of ties that bind peo­ple, place, and prac­tice across space and time. A great deal of aca­d­e­mic work explores this inter­play of food, prac­tice, iden­tity and sub­ject for­ma­tion, much of it bound together by a com­mit­ment that through a fuller under­stand­ing of those rela­tions, we bet­ter under­stand our­selves, our pasts, and the com­plex­i­ties of the spaces and lives we inhabit and enact in a transna­tional world. This con­fer­ence seeks to enhance that under­stand­ing.
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Call for papers
Working the Frame: Comparative Approaches to Asian Canadian Literature & Culture
John Douglas Taylor Conference 2012
McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada
October 25 & 26, 2012

Call for Papers
The emer­gence of Asian Canadian lit­er­a­ture and cul­ture as an iden­ti­fi­able force over the last twenty years is abun­dantly clear: Asian Canadian fic­tion and poetry have won major lit­er­ary prizes, there are sev­eral active Asian Canadian the­atre groups in major cities, and film fes­ti­vals on Asian and Asian Canadian film are held annu­ally. Despite the grow­ing promi­nence of Asian Canadian arts, how­ever, the broad pub­lic per­cep­tion that we are liv­ing in a post-racial or even a post-national world makes it dif­fi­cult to estab­lish insti­tu­tional ground­ing for a field founded on explor­ing racial, eth­nic, and national iden­tity; to date, no uni­ver­sity pro­gram or depart­ment devoted to Asian Canadian Studies has emerged. Yet, as the recent Macleans arti­cle Too Asian? and the strong responses it has gen­er­ated demon­strate, racial iden­tity pol­i­tics are nei­ther obso­lete nor dead, although new pos­si­bil­i­ties for coali­tional oppor­tu­ni­ties have arisen between and among dif­fer­ent racial­ized groups in Canada, and between dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ties in the Asian dias­pora. While the pol­i­tics of race and iden­tity have shifted over the last two decades with the turn to dias­pora and transna­tional approaches in crit­i­cal race stud­ies, eth­nic stud­ies, post­colo­nial stud­ies, and cul­tural stud­ies, it is pre­cisely this shift that demands atten­tion to new devel­op­ments in the cir­cu­la­tion of knowl­edge about and the expe­ri­ence of race and nation­al­ity in Canada.

The pur­pose of this con­fer­ence is to explore the cur­rent for­ma­tion and future devel­op­ments of Asian Canadian lit­er­a­ture and cul­ture in a comparative/relational frame, exam­in­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ties and respon­si­bil­i­ties of coali­tional pol­i­tics and col­lab­o­ra­tive cul­tural pro­duc­tion, as well as the very def­i­n­i­tion of the term Asian Canadian. We invite pro­pos­als that engage with Asian Canadian lit­er­a­ture and cul­ture and are espe­cially inter­ested in research that inves­ti­gates cross-cultural rela­tion­ships, col­lab­o­ra­tions, and antag­o­nisms recounted in, enacted by, or in con­ver­sa­tion with Asian Canadian cul­tural prod­ucts.
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This CFP con­tains a novel for­mat called Pecha Kucha, which I had to look up. This for­mat wouldn’t be suit­able for every aca­d­e­mic research, obvi­ously, but it’s an inter­est­ing approach to keep­ing pre­sen­ta­tions con­cise and fast-paced.

The College of Arts, University of Glasgow, is excited to announce Spaces of (Dis)location, a two-day mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary post­grad­u­ate con­fer­ence tak­ing place on 24th – 25th May 2012.

As national and cul­tural bound­aries are blurred in our increas­ingly global soci­ety, the ideas of space and loca­tion — whether phys­i­cal or meta­phys­i­cal, real or imag­i­nary — are evolv­ing. This notion pro­vides the stim­u­lus for a con­fer­ence that we hope will inspire cre­ativ­ity and debate across many sub­jects in the arts and humanities.

A major aim of this con­fer­ence is to fos­ter net­works and con­nec­tions across dif­fer­ent insti­tu­tions and sub­jects. It is also our inten­tion to pub­lish an edited vol­ume with arti­cles from this con­fer­ence through the University of Glasgow’s inter­na­tional post­grad­u­ate research jour­nal eSharp.

Possible top­ics may include, but are not lim­ited to:

• Ideas of space: phys­i­cal and imaginary
• Spatial dichotomies (urban/rural, public/private)
• Globalization
• Localism
• Cultural and nat­ural spaces
• Adaptation (lit­er­ary, lin­guis­tic, cin­e­matic, etc.)
• Cultural dias­pora
• Immigration
• Spaces of performance
• The space of the body

We wel­come sub­mis­sions of abstracts for papers in the clas­sic 20-minute for­mat, but are also keen to accept dif­fer­ent pre­sen­ta­tion for­mats. There will be a poster ses­sion and a Pecha Kucha ses­sion on each day of the con­fer­ence and we would wel­come your sub­mis­sions in these for­mats too.

A Pecha Kucha pre­sen­ta­tion con­sists of 20 slides, each shown for exactly 20 sec­onds, so the entire pre­sen­ta­tion will there­fore last 6 min­utes and 40 sec­onds. It is an engag­ing and chal­leng­ing for­mat for researchers at every stage of their career, but pro­vides a par­tic­u­larly cre­ative for­mat for those just start­ing their research to receive feed­back on their project design and ini­tial find­ings.
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Call for Papers: Creating Publics, Creating Democracies

That there is a rela­tion­ship between pub­lic­ness and democ­racy has often been taken for granted. However, at this time of wide­spread insta­bil­ity, polit­i­cal upheaval and exper­i­men­ta­tion, when publics are increas­ingly being called upon to act, it is some­times in the name of democ­racy, but not always. By explor­ing how ideas and prac­tices of pub­lic­ness and democ­racy are being con­sti­tuted, enacted, related and recon­fig­ured in dif­fer­ent set­tings, this work­shop aims to inves­ti­gate the modes of pub­lic action and democ­racy being invoked, imag­ined and strug­gled over around the world. We wel­come paper pro­pos­als from a diver­sity of approaches, par­tic­u­larly research and works in progress that help us to col­lec­tively consider:

• How issues become mat­ters of pub­lic con­cern and how, where and when pub­lic prac­tices inter­sect with forms of democ­racy, or other forms of politics?
• How actors (indi­vid­u­als, groups, insti­tu­tions, net­works, mate­ri­als, devices) become pub­lic and whether forms of demo­c­ra­tic pol­i­tics emerge as a result?
• How pub­lic spaces are assem­bled and how they become spaces of demo­c­ra­tic or other forms of politics?
• How rela­tions between modes of pub­lic action and forms of demo­c­ra­tic pol­i­tics are being medi­ated and how method­olog­i­cally such rela­tions can be traced, mapped, analysed, the­o­rised and bet­ter understood?

Building on the suc­cess of the July 2011 inter­dis­ci­pli­nary work­shop, Creating Publics, we seek work­ing papers from fields includ­ing (but not lim­ited to): anthro­pol­ogy, pol­i­tics and pub­lic pol­icy, cul­tural stud­ies, envi­ron­men­tal stud­ies, soci­ol­ogy, sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy stud­ies, infor­ma­tion stud­ies, geog­ra­phy, plan­ning and media stud­ies. We hope that through engag­ing with empir­i­cal and/or con­cep­tual works together, this work­shop will serve as an open­ing for con­ver­sa­tions about the cre­ation of publics and democ­ra­cies.
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Call for Papers:
International Conference on Religious Travel and Tourism in a Globalising World
27 – 28 April 2012, Nicosia, Cyprus

The University of Nicosia, the Euro-Mediterranean Academy of Tourism (EMAT), and the Cyprus Tourism Organization (CTO), wel­come the sub­mis­sion of papers for an inter­na­tional con­fer­ence, with the title:

Guiding the Pilgrim: Religious Travel and Tourism in a Globalising World

Confirmed Keynote Speakers
John Eade, Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Roehampton and Visiting Professor at the Migration Research Unit, University College London
Simon Coleman, Chancellor Jackman Chaired Professor, Dept. and Centre for the Study of Religion (Cross-Appointment, Dept. of Anthropology)

Conference Theme:
With more and more peo­ple being on the move in today‚s world, guid­ing them to and around places has become a key issue. There has devel­oped a vast writ­ten and oral lit­er­a­ture designed to help peo­ple to their des­ti­na­tion and enjoy their time there. This lit­er­a­ture ranges from brochures, adver­tise­ments, travel and audio guides, site sig­nage and inter­pre­ta­tion, and descrip­tions of local­i­ties in the media to travel writ­ing and travel blog­ging. Many of those trav­el­ling are inter­ested in reli­gious sites with the result that reli­gion is a now key con­trib­u­tor to travel and tourism around the world. Religious tourism or, per­haps more appro­pri­ately, reli­gious pil­grim­age flour­ishes around the world, despite the declin­ing num­bers of those involved in insti­tu­tional reli­gion in Europe at least. However, pil­grim­age is not just about insti­tu­tional reli­gion — it includes spir­i­tual travel and sec­u­lar pil­grim­age. Spiritual travel involves those who are engaged in new forms of spir­i­tu­al­ity such as New Age‚ beliefs and prac­tices. Secular pil­grims include those who are find­ing mean­ing through dif­fer­ent types of tourism such as cul­tural, her­itage and nature tourism.
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