Call for papers: Travelling Food and Beverages: In and Out of Japan. Jerusalem, November 3-5 2013.
----------------------------------------------
We are calling for papers to be submitted for an international workshop on "Travelling Food and
Beverages: In and Out of Japan"to be held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in November 3-5, 2013.
The background to this proposal is the intense globalization of Japanese cuisine during the past three decades that has continued despite the deteriorating national economy. The workshop will explore the variety of issues centered on how food and beverages have
"travelled": that is, circulated, flowed, interacted, transformed within Japan and globally. In other words, we purposely ask what happens when practices, ideas and the materiality of cuisine become mobile.
Such a perspective may be examined through the following kinds of themes: regulation of food movements, travelling culinary expertise, circulating recipes, playful fusions in the kitchen, traffic in the implements of cooking and eating, food and media, food as soft power, the transfer of knowledge about nutrition, international competitions and interchanges, cuisine and its relation to social mobility or inequality, flows and networks characterizing infrastructure for food and beverages, technologies allowing flows of products, biographies of victuals and drinks (movement along time), or portable foods (lunchboxes for example). The addition of these descriptors of movement or travel to food and beverages is aimed as prodding scholars towards what are perhaps new insights. Thus a specific focus on movement and travel may be seen as part of a wider trend in the social sciences and humanities away from sedentary perspectives to a much more fluid and flowing perspective.
To be sure, previous studies of such movements of food and beverages have been undertaken, but our aim is to place within one project- a workshop and edited volume to emerge from it - a multidisciplinary array of relevant studies that carry not only individual contributions but can be read as one complete endeavor.
Thus such a focus allows us to look at emergent phenomena, unintended consequences of movement or indeed to try and understand if food and beverages take different routes of movements. Analytically, we also ask in what ways does the case of Japan, or cases taken from Japan, uniquely contribute to more general studies of food and beverages. By making explicit what such cases can reveal about wider processes we may add to the burgeoning scholarly literature on food and beverages.
Proposals (both individual and panel proposals), including name, institutional affiliation, the title of the paper, and an abstract of 400 words (with relevant keywords listed), should be sent by March 15th to helena.grinshpun@mail.huji.ac.il. Successful applicants would be asked to send the complete paper of 4,500 words at least three weeks prior to the conference.

The organizers will make an effort to secure funding for accommodations to presenters from abroad.

Sponsors: The Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace and The Louis Frieberg Center for East Asian Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Helena Grinshpun, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Nissim Otmazgin, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Eyal Ben-Ari, European Center for Japanese Studies