Redefining the Welcome Table: Inclusion and Exclusion in American Foodways
A Graduate Student Conference
September 25—26, 2014
University of Mississippi
Oxford, Mississippi
Together with the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, the Southern Foodways Alliance will host a graduate student conference at the University of Mississippi to study inclusion and exclusion in American Foodways.
Attendance is free and open to the public.
Click HERE for the schedule of events.
Bartow J. Elmore, author of Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism, will be the keynote speaker for the conference. His book explores the ways Coca-Cola built a global empire, and the effects of that empire on cultures, environments, and economies. That talk will be on Thursday at 6:00 in the Tupelo room at Barnard Observatory.
All other talks will be held at the Oxford Depot, behind the Gertrude Ford Center.
For more information, email info@southernfoodways.org.
Here’s the approach we’ll take: This past summer, the country marked the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which desegregated places of public accommodation. The role of foodways has historically been overlooked as a centerpiece in discussions about justice and equity. This conference, which hosts graduate students from across the country, attempts to rectify that. Academic panels will explore foodways in several contexts: its use to sustain oppressive structures and ideologies; its role as a hopeful pathway to eliminating inequity and historical blindness; and, finally, its meaningfulness in revealing pride in identity and building bridges across differences.
