Call for Papers: Gendered food practices from seed to waste

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Call for papers for the Yearbook of Women’s History (2016)

Traditional food festival

Pastoralist women at traditional food fair in Gujarat, India  (photo credit: MARAG)

 

Gendered food practices from seed to waste
Guest editors: Bettina Bock and Jessica Duncan

About the Yearbook

The Yearbook of Women’s History is a peer-reviewed academic annual covering all aspects of gender connected with historical research throughout the world. It has a respectable history in itself, reporting on issues concerning women and gender for 35 years. The Yearbook has addressed topics such as women and crime, women and war, and gender, ethnicity and (post)colonialism. Overtime the Yearbook has shifted focus from purely historical analysis to a broader historical and gender analysis, focused on women’s and men’s roles in society. By focusing on specific themes, the Yearbook aspires that each issue crosses cultures and historical time periods, while offering readers the opportunity to compare perspectives within each volume. There has been one previous issue related to food: Gender and Nurture (1999). The present volume is a follow-up and aims to testify to differences in scholarly approaches in this field since the 1990s.

About the Annual Issue

In nearly all societies gender has been and continues to be central in defining roles and responsibilities around food production, manufacturing, provisioning, eating, and disposal. Food–related work and practices along with context and cultures serve to construct and reinforce identities and social structures. At the same time, the gendered practices around food are complex and often contradictory. Much of the literature on gender and food explores these complexities and contradictions but continues to make use of dichotomies (i.e., rural/urban; local/global; producer/consumer; large-scale/small-scale; man/woman; past/future) that are increasingly less suited to critical analyses of the fluidity of experiences and science and thus limit our ability to better understand relationships between food and gender.

This raises questions about what then takes place in the in-between spaces, i.e. where producers are also consumers; where gender roles and norms are challenged; where local custom challenges global standards? What concepts, categories, discoveries, and theories can help expand our understanding of gender when it comes to food, and of food when it comes to gender?

The 2016 Yearbook of Women’s History will explore these questions by following food-related practices across time and space from ‘seed to waste’. Papers will consider gendered practices across the food production cycle across the globe from various disciplinary perspective and intersection points (i.e., age, race, sexuality, class) so as to uncover new insights into the impacts, implications and shifting relations of gender across food system, including practices undertaken in and across:

  • Food growing;
  • Processing;
  • Selling;
  • Buying;
  • Cooking;
  • Serving/service;
  • Eating;
  • Cleaning;
  • Disposing.

The deeply interdisciplinary special issue will bring together a diverse collection of innovative and accessible articles. In exploring the questions raised above, we encourage authors to interrogate traditional categories, dichotomies, and binaries and contribute to the advancement of understanding of the dynamics and relationships between gender and food. Above all, we are interested in papers that go beyond questions about women and food to explore changing understandings and boundaries at the intersection of food and gender across time and space.

We encourage authors of all disciplines and locations to submit abstracts (maximum 300 words) before 20 February 2016 to Evelien Walhout (editorial secretary): e.walhout@let.ru.nl

Timeline

  • Deadline abstracts: 20 Feb. 2016
  • Deadline first version papers: 2 May 2016
  • Peer review: 16 May 2016
  • Deadline second version: 1 July 2016
  • Final editing: 1 Sept. 2016
  • Publication: November/December 2016

Short Bios of Guest Editors

Bettina Bock is Associate Professor in Rural Sociology at Wageningen University (The Netherlands). She is the editor in chief of Sociologia Ruralis. She holds a PhD in rural sociology based on a study of gender and rural development policy and practice defended in 2004. Her research projects include rural development and social innovation, rural gender relations, as well as sustainable food consumption and production.

Originally from Canada, Jessica Duncan is Assistant Professor in Rural Sociology at Wageningen University (The Netherlands). She is an Associate Editor of the journal Food Security and co-chair of the Food Policy and Governance Research Network of the European Consortium for Political Research. She holds a PhD in Food Policy from City University London. Her research areas include: food policy; food security; global governance; social practices; gender; and participation.

 

 

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About FoodGovernance

Jessica Duncan is Associate Professor in Rural Sociology at Wageningen University (the Netherlands). She holds a PhD in Food Policy from City University London (2014). Jessica’s main research focus concerns the practices and politics of participation in food policy processes, particularly the relationships (formal and non-formal) between governance organizations, systems of food provisioning, the environment, and the actors engaged in and across these spaces. More specifically, she maps the diverse ways that actors participate in policy-making processes, analysing how the resulting policies are shaped, implemented, challenged, and resisted, and she theorizes about what this means for socio-ecological transformation. Participation and engagement is at the core of her approach. In turn, she is active in a broad range of local, national and international initiatives with the aim of better understanding participation processes with a view towards transitioning to just and sustainable food systems. She is involved in several research projects including ROBUST, HortEco & SHEALTHY. Jessica is published regularly in academic journals. She recently co-edited the Handbook on Sustainable and Regenerative Food Systems (2020). Her other books include Food Security Governance: Civil society participation in the Committee on World Food Security (2015) and an edited volume called Sustainable food futures: Multidisciplinary solutions (2017). Jessica has received several awards for her teaching and in 2017 she was awarded Teacher of the Year for Wageningen University (shortlisted again in 2018 and 2019, longlisted in 2020). With the funds she has received for these awards she launched a story-telling workshop for students and faculty, with storytelling trainer, Emma Holmes. Jessica is on the Editorial Board of the journal Sociologia Ruralis and is an advisor to the Traditional Cultures Project (USA). She is a member of the Wageningen Young Academy and sits on the Sustainability Board of Experts at Wageningen University.

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