CFP: Special Issue of ALR 'Imagining the possibilities – food as leisure in a fragmented world'

Call for Papers: Special Issue Annals of Leisure Research

Imagining the possibilities – food as leisure in a fragmented world

Guest Editors

Dr David Scott – Dalarna University

Dr Tara Duncan – Dalarna University

This special issue seeks to explore the role of food as leisure in a contemporary, mobile and ephemeral world. Our aim is to bring together narratives that bridge ‘spaces-between’ and explore the inherent tensions between food and/as leisure. Food and our consumption (and production) of it offers opportunities to explore the contemporary world. Food, it might be argued, is representative of progress. It identifies one as mobile. However while food might allow us to be, or at least aspire to be, the über mobile ‘cosmopolitan’ global citizen, tensions exist. Contested representations of food through class, culture, background, education, and/or religion, can also denote increasing levels of obesity, poorly informed nutritional choices, and increasing famine in many parts of the world (including in the west). The tensions between these two positions – food as cultural capital vs food as sustenance – act to challenge our ‘selves’, as well as our place in-the-world.

Food is at once an agent of globalisation as well as subject to globalising forces. The world where food is represented as some sort of stable modernity has arguably disappeared, replaced by one where the search for meaning through ‘eating’ is a representational characteristic of late modernity. As Baumann (2000) suggests, contemporary (western) societies are an amalgam of amorphous communities – no longer are they easily recognisable rather they are outcomes of transience (Vogel and Oschmann, 2013) or complex (im)mobilities (Scott, 2015). Food, as a leisure pursuit, therefore becomes emblematic of Bauman’s (2000) liquid modernity. This is a world where to be ‘modern’ is to understand the domination of the individual, where personal choice is paramount. However, it is also a world in which choice is unequal and risk abounds. We suggest that using Bauman’s metaphor of ‘liquidity’ offers potential to look at food in a leisure context as a means of critiquing late modernity.

In this special issue we seek papers that highlight the inconsistencies in food and/as leisure. Topics for potential papers may focus on but are not limited to:

• Food (im)mobilities
• Food and leisure as a way of exploring liquid/late modernity.
• Food, leisure and ‘risk’.
• Eating as embodied, affective leisure practice.
• Food as offering resistance to neo-liberalism.
• Tourism and food – the ethics of consuming the other for/ as privileged leisure
• Leisure, identity (politics) and the fetishisation of food
• Food, Leisure and the possibilities of the ‘glocal’
• Moorings in a liquid world – food as restructuring fragmented lives
• Fast food – slow food/ liquid modernity – solid modernity.
• Food and affective/mobile/ more-than representations methodologies
• Privileging the self. Consuming food as a narcissistic performance.
• ‘Slow’ consumption – the future or a romaticisation of an imagined past?

References

BAUMAN, Z. 2000. Liquid modernity, Cambridge, Polity Press;.

SCOTT, D. G. 2015. The practice of everyday life performed away from home: A reflexive ethnography of a group tour. Unpublished PhD, University of Otago.

VOGEL, M. P. & OSCHMANN, C. 2013. Cruising Through Liquid Modernity. Tourist Studies.

Important Dates for Authors:

Submission of Abstracts: Please send proposed paper title and an abstract of no more than 250 words to the guest editor, David Scott (dsc@du.se) by 15th August 2017.

You will be advised of the outcome no later than 15th September 2017.

Submission of Full Paper: 15th March 2018

Best regards

David and Tara

Dr David Scott

Högskolan Dalarna (Dalarna University)

Centre for Tourism and Leisure Research

(Borlänge Campus)

Falun 791 88

SWEDEN

e: dsc@du.se

p: +46 (0)761390021
w: www.du-se.academia.edu/DavidScott w: www.du.se/en/cetler