Feeding the Civic Imagination: Call for Papers
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The Civic Paths research group invites you to contribute to a special issue of the cultural studies journal, Lateral. Details are below.
Forum: Feeding the Civic Imagination!
Abstract proposals of 200 words due July 30, 2021 (form)
Completed submissions of 2,000 words due January 15, 2022
You stroll by a bakery. The door opens, spilling the smell of fresh bread onto the street. You cannot resist. Soon you hold a warm loaf in your hands. Your fingers scrape the flaky golden-brown crust. Will you taste it or wait to share it? Will you be motivated to learn more about where this food came from? Will you be inspired to embark on your own baking adventure? Or, perhaps you stumble onto a cooking video on YouTube. Mesmerized, you watch spices sizzle before other ingredients are added to create a Punjabi-style cauliflower sabji. Before you know it, you are transported to another time and place, immersed in a memory of a meal shared many years ago. In an instant, the past collides with the present, inviting you to weave together the sprawling connections that are revealed.
Food can nourish and inspire us. Food can be used to shame us. Food can connect us to each other. Food can divide us. Food can remind us of the past. It can also inspire us to think about the future, to imagine culinary possibilities, even as we encounter real world constraints, tensions, and challenges. With a mindfulness towards how food has historically often been used in framing racist, gendered, ableist, fatphobic, heteropatriarchal, colonialist, and ethnonationalist imaginings of civic participation, we aim to channel our collective energies and shared emotions in relation to food to pave the way for tangible social change. It’s not about choosing one food item over another. It’s about reaffirming and challenging our beliefs in the power of food to protect our rights and fight for justice. It’s about charting paths through the creative, ambivalent, or painful ways that food shows up in our lives. How can we imagine more just and inclusive ways to involve food in civic imagining?
Help us explore these connections! This is a call to practitioners, artists, community leaders, scholars, and others who want to share their lived and observed experiences with baking, cooking, and eating as a shared, emotional, critical, challenging, creative, civic, even nostalgic experience. We invite you to contribute to a Lateral Forum focused on food and civic imagination, curated by the Civic Paths Group at the University of Southern California. The Civic Paths Group explores continuities between online participatory culture and civic engagement through outreach, creative work, popular culture, storytelling, research, and academic inquiry.
We define civic imagination as the capacity to imagine alternatives to current cultural, social, political, or economic conditions; one cannot change the world unless one can imagine what a better world might look like. Civic Imagination is the foundation of a greater process in which members of a society come together to share their memories and future change they want to see in their world. We think of imagination as a force with power, and collective imaginations as civic arenas where serious issues can be explored, critiqued, and aspirational futures can be crafted through, among other things, eating, cooking, and baking. Whether it is cooking a recipe passed down over generations, fighting food injustice, valuing the fleeting experience of a shared meal, relearning how we relate to what we eat, exploring a flavor combination learned over YouTube, or deepening the connections we make by sharing our bakes on social media in the midst of a pandemic lockdown, food has the power to connect, challenge, and inspire us.
For this Lateral Forum, we welcome contributions focusing on different dimensions of the relationships (emergent and long standing) between appreciating and questioning food, cooking, baking, imagination, and memory. Some questions of special interest include:
How does food inspire or stifle an inclusive imagination? How can we encourage ways to involve food in civic imagination and debates on justice?
How can we inspire our shared imagination as we prepare meals, serve dishes and eat what we made? How does food connect with our memories and aspirations?
How can the media and popular culture support food and civic imagination? What are the opportunities? What are the challenges? How to reckon with the history and heritage of the food we fuse?
How do we connect imagination, cooking, and political meaning?
How can we confront the structural barriers and limitations around food justice, that go beyond a poor food system onto the legacies of settler colonialism?
How can we resist and imagine alternatives to (racist, sexist, ableist) power structures that dictate who and which bodies are “allowed” to interact with foods?
What has the pandemic taught us about food and framing the imagination? What examples and approaches need to be documented at this moment in time?
How can we cook with civic imagination? What are the “recipes” that could guide us?
How do we want cooking practices to look like in the future?
We aim to create a space for these conversations around food and the civic imagination. We are open to experiences, case studies, annotated recipes, or critical short pieces that provoke thought and reflection. Written submissions should adhere to the 2,000 word limit. Media-rich and interactive pieces that make use of Lateral as an open-access, web-based platform will be scoped on a case-by-case basis.
