On June 24-25 this year, the sixth BSA Food Study Group conference, "Re-imagining food systems, sustainability, futures and the everyday", will be held at Monash University, Prato, Italy. I'm organising a panel on the theme of "Rethinking sugar" and am looking for exciting abstracts. The call for papers is below. If you would like to be involved, please send a proposed paper title and 200 word abstract to me at k.throsby@leeds.ac.uk by Friday 15th February. The final papers for the panel will be decided by the end of February, with all those who submitted proposals notified of the outcome by this date.
If there is sufficient interest, there is also the possibility of a special issue / edited collection coming out of this event.
So if you fancy joining me in Prato to talk about all things sugar, get in touch. I'm looking forward to hearing from you.
Call for Papers: ‘Rethinking Sugar’ Panel
Sugar consumption is increasingly supplanting dietary fat as the primary culprit in high rates of both obesity and its associated chronic diseases, with a particular focus on type II diabetes. This rush to demonise sugar is dressed in the neoliberal rhetorics of health as good citizenship, and the ‘wrongness’ of sugar is firmly sedimented in the everyday talk and practices of food, foodwork and consumption. This panel aims to explore the social, political and historical life of sugar in this moment of declared ‘crisis’, asking what other ‘work’ the repudiation of sugar is performing, what exclusions and silences that work enacts, what new subjectivities anti-sugar campaigns bring into being and to what effects, and how we can use sugar as a lens for thinking about food and health inequalities both nationally and internationally. This panel provides an opportunity to rethink sugar beyond the dominant catastrophizing anti-obesity health narrative to explore the uneven ways in which the lived realities of sugar are embodied and negotiated.
Paper proposals are invited that focus on (but are not limited to):
- Sugar’s racialised history of slavery
- Exploitation and Empire
- Sugar as a travelling commodity
- Sugar and the ‘war on obesity’
- Sugar taxation
- The gendering of sugar
- The social role of sweetness
- The contested science of anti-sugar
- Anti-sugar and low-carb sociality.
