Call for Papers! Crossing Boundaries: Food and Southeast Asia, 1500-Present! 16 Apr 2025 – 17 Apr 2025!

Call for Papers! Crossing Boundaries: Food and Southeast Asia, 1500-Present! 16 Apr 2025 – 17 Apr 2025!

CALL FOR PAPERS DEADLINE: 25 OCTOBER 2024

Scholars of Southeast Asia have increasingly adopted ‘global’ frameworks to understand societies in the region, focusing on mobility, exchange, and connections. This trend has not, however, tended to characterise the literature about food in Southeast Asia, which typically uses the nation state as a unit of analysis. There is a vibrant scholarship on food and nationalism, especially national cuisines. In Southeast Asia, a dominant focus on the nation can obscure stories of exchange across communities in a region historically characterised by mixing, borrowing, adapting foods and food knowledge, making claims to “national” cuisine problematic and highly contested. This workshop invites submissions about Southeast Asia and food that engage framings beyond the nation. What connections do these framings allow us to see, and what impact do these connections have on understanding Southeast Asian societies? This workshop will convene scholars working across a range of disciplines to interrogate these questions.

We invite submissions of diverse methodological approaches on various themes, including but not limited to:

• Foods, recipes, dishes, production techniques, and consumption patterns that transcend the boundary of a single nation-state
• Foods and food knowledge that circulate, change meaning, or take on new forms when they transcend boundaries
• Knowledge exchanges and transformations associated with transnational foods
• Migration and the relationship between food and diasporas, both within Southeast Asia, and among Southeast Asians abroad
• Contestations over claims of national cuisine and gastrodiplomacy in Southeast Asia

SUBMISSION OF PROPOSALS

Paper proposals should include a title, an abstract (200-300 words maximum), and a brief personal biography (about 150 words) for submission by 25 October 2024. Please also include a statement confirming that your proposed paper has not been published or committed elsewhere and that you are willing to revise the version of your paper presented at the workshop for potential inclusion in a publication.

Proposals are to be submitted to [email protected] using this template. Authors of selected proposals can expect to be notified by end November 2024. Workshop presenters will be required to submit short draft papers (4,000-6,000) by 12 March 2025. These papers will be circulated to fellow panellists and discussants in advance of the workshop and need not be fully polished. Indeed, we expect that presenters will be open to feedback from fellow participants and discussion at the workshop to revise and expand their draft papers for publication.

This workshop will be held in person. The Asia Research Institute will provide overseas participants with full or partial airfare funding as well as three nights of accommodation in Singapore. Please indicate in the proposal form if you require funding support.

For more details, refer here