Call for papers / contributions for next year’s Anthropology and Geography – Dialogues Past, Present, and Future conference on 4-7th June 2020 hosted by The Royal Anthropological Institute, The British Academy, British Museum, Royal Geographical Society, and SOAS University of London.
Our panel, Mapping the Edible City: Making Visible Communities and Food in the City, welcomes inputs from anthropologists, geographers and other disciplines to explore the emergence and possibilities for urban food mapping practices. We seek papers/ contributions that explore that explore the tensions, criticisms and new theoretical and methodological directions that such mapping introduces across disciplines in relation to key themes that include (but are not limited to) identity, place, gender, migration, the senses, economy, and home/ place-making through food. We welcome both academic papers and other contributions including but not limited to maps, audio, and video.
Please see the abstract below, and submit a 250 word abstract proposal by 8th January 2020 via the online form, which can be found here. Further information about the conference can be found here. If you have any questions for the convenors ahead of submitting, please email
Abstract:
Traditional mapping practices have drastically changed in recent years from having an apolitical, authorative voice. Enabled by new technologies, maps are no longer singular, static or reductive but instead are being transformed to make visible, educate and to empower the many, be engaging different perspectives, topics, tempos and mobilities. Traditionally based in geography due to engagement with space and place, spatial and urban anthropology now also speak to the particularities of place and locality, while a geographical turn welcomes in thick description as storytelling and new media to the map. Popular, novel approaches include radical, guerrilla, emotional and critical cartography where participants are literally ‘mapping back’ their identities, values and priorities into the picture. Urban food practices, a topic of increasing interest in both anthropology and geography due to increasing urbanisation, precarity and a desire to reconnect to nature and to one’s food source, is also prolific in uptaking new mapping styles. Using GIS and other forms of artist, participatory and community mapping styles amongst others, it provides a rich arena in which to apply mapping as a tool to communicate new ways of understanding identities, relationships, informal and alternative economies, mobilities, and connections in and across the city. This panel seeks papers that explore the tensions, criticisms and new theoretical and methodological directions that such mapping introduces across disciplines in relation to key themes that include (but are not limited to) identity, place, gender, migration, the senses, economy, and home/ place-making through food.