Fourteenth International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

The global food system is plagued with inequities that often reinforced by our communication choices. Moreover, the United Nations 2019 Global Sustainable Development Report identified food systems and nutrition patterns as entry points for transformative action. However, media coverage and discourse tend to center on wealthier countries completely ignoring the Global South. While there has been recent work on communication and power within food systems that draws on organizational, environmental, and health communication scholarship, “more can be done to adequately account for the overwhelming and disproportionate effect of food system inequalities globally, especially in the Global South” (Gordon et al., 2022, p. 6). Given that call, this project seeks to take a dialogic/constitutive view of food security by approaching food security, health, and food justice through a culture-centered approach. The framework of the culture-centered approach is driven toward theory-building and highlighting solutions that emerge from within the communities (Dutta, 2008, 2015). To this end, the authors of this piece have taken an ethnographic approach. We utilize various field notes, participant observations, and autoethnographic reflections to acknowledge inequities surrounding food insecurities in both rural and urban parts of the globe. Also, authors will follow Lengel’s (1998) charge to communication scholars by asking the question, “How can we benefit the disempowered?” (p. 247). While communication around food systems often helps to maintain inequalities in food systems, we know that communication can help to enact alternative realities for how communities interact with food systems and food security.

Presenters

Tomeka Robinson
Senior Associate Dean of Honors College and Professor of Rhetoric and Public Advocacy, Honors College, Hofstra University, New York, United States

Sabrina Singh
Student, PhD in Communication, Rutgers University, New Jersey, United States

Cody Clemens
McCoy Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, Marietta College, Ohio, United States