[Air-L] Feeding the Civic Imagination - CFP

[Paulina Lanz]

*With apologies for cross-posting*

I would like to share the CFP of a peer-reviewed forum that I thought could
be of interest.

Let me know if you have any questions!

Paulina
___
Forum: Feeding the Civic Imagination!

Abstract proposals of 200 words due July 30, 2021 (form
<https://forms.gle/UNhrccsSG1dYU1QF7>)
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
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stoPYwdPU-E>. 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
<https://civicpaths.uscannenberg.org/> 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.

To Potential Authors

Please submit a 200-word description of your piece, the media you plan to
use, and a brief 50-word bio by filling out this form
<https://forms.gle/UNhrccsSG1dYU1QF7> before July 30, 2021 to be considered
for publication.

Abstracts will be reviewed by the guest editors by September 30, 2021.
Completed submissions will be expected on January 15, 2022. All submissions
will undergo a double-anonymous peer review process according to journal
policies.

*-*
*Paulina Lanz*
Doctoral Candidate | *USC* Annenberg
Organizer | *Critical Mediations <http://criticalmediations.org/>*
she/her/hers