Dear Colleagues,
Melissa Stone and I are excited to share a call for proposals for an edited collection on the Techno-Material Rhetorics of Food and Cooking. Our larger CFP is included in this Google Form and included below.
Submission Details
Interested authors should submit a chapter proposal of no more than 500-words, along with a two-page CV, via the google Google Form linked above
As editors, we are invested in a transparent and supportive review process that is informed by Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices. If you have questions or would like to pitch an idea prior to formally submitting a proposal, feel free to contact the editors.
Timeline
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Chapter proposals due: January 15, 2027
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Authors notified: February 15, 2027
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Full chapter draft: August 1, 2027
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Feedback on chapter drafts: October 15, 2027
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Revised full chapter draft: January 15, 2028
We look forward to reading your proposals!
Best,
Melissa and Zach
The Techno-Material Rhetorics of Food and Cooking
Collection Editors
- Melissa Stone, Appalachian State University (stonemm2)
- Zachary Beare, North Carolina State University (zbeare)
Beyond being a basic need for survival, food is central to our cultural and media landscapes. Depictions of cooking and eating circulate across and between media, crowding the feeds of streaming services and social media platforms alike. The cookbook industry brings in $4 billion a year, and there are more food blogs and mobile recipe apps than ever before. Food is a central driver of consumerism. People eagerly pay for novel ingredients, indulgent restaurant experiences, and the latest gadgets. Food provides us with pleasure; cooking is integral to keeping community; and both give us a sense of purpose through making and doing. The politics of food and cooking are also deeply entangled with sociocultural concerns like identity, environmental impact, social class, political affiliation, global trade, history, and the occupation and utilization of space and place. Food and cooking are integral to life and culture around the world and to the debates and tensions that pepper human experience.
With the long-lasting interest in food and cooking and the contemporary explosion of food-related media content, we believe the time is ripe for an edited collection that examines rhetorics of food and cooking from a techno-materialist perspective. That is, rather than positioning rhetorics of food and cooking as disembodied, purely-discursive, and as neutral practices, this collection argues that rhetorics of food and cooking are entangled with technological, physical, emotional, economic, and systemic realities. It invites contributors to consider the complex rhetorical ecologies of food and cooking and to think about the various human and nonhuman actors that produce rhetorics of food and cooking. While we welcome proposals for chapters that analyze discursive representations of food and cooking, we are especially interested in projects that examine the technological and material dimensions—broadly understood—of rhetorics of food and cooking, especially from feminist new materialist perspectives. Attending to materiality is especially important to the focus of this edited collection because of the ways that technologies (old and new), bodies, and ingredients relate to rhetorics of food and cooking. Such attention to materiality reveals the complex intra-actions of human and non-human actors in the production and circulation of rhetorics of food and cooking.
We see our edited collection as contributing, expanding upon, and updating the existing scholarship on the rhetorics of food and cooking (Eckstein & Conley, 2020; Frye and Bruner, 2012; Goldthwaite, 2017; Hanganu-Bresch, 2022; Moeller & Frost, 2016; Stokes & Atkins-Sayre, 2019, and many others). We especially see our edited collection as an opportunity to take stock of how our technological relationships to food and cooking have changed in the aftermath of a global pandemic and in relation to how social media platforms provide different ways for sharing knowledges about food and cooking. Questions collection pieces could explore in relation to the techno-material rhetorics of food and cooking include, but are not limited to, the following:
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How do media platforms shape consumption, sharing, and critique of rhetorics of food and cooking? How do they change our understanding of the significance of food, cooking, and labors they require?
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How are ingredients, cooking practices, and dining habits politicized? Why? And by whom?
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How do rhetorics of food and cooking intersect with issues of access, design, and usability?
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How do rhetorics of food and cooking intersect with race, gender, class, ability? How are our understandings of rhetorics of food and cooking always intersectional?
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How are rhetorics of food and cooking both shaped by and shapers of affects and emotions?
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How are food, cooking, and eating quantified and datafied and for what purposes?
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How are food and cooking professionalized? How do we understand expertise?
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How and when are food and cooking conceptualized as technical or scientific endeavors, and how and when are food and cooking conceptualized as creative or affective endeavors?
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How do we understand returns to earlier food practices (canning, preserving, fermentation, gardening, etc.)?
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How and when are food and cooking framed as medicine, nutrition, pleasure, fun, or cultural preservation?
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How are food technologies and devices marketed and to whom?
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How are food, cooking, and eating embodied practices?
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How might we explore the techno-material rhetorics of food and cooking in classrooms?
It is our hope that the framing of this call offers an expansive menu of options for prospective contributors. We believe that this is a topic that would be of interest to scholar-teachers across rhetorical studies and histories, composition studies, new media studies, gender studies, technical communication, and pedagogy. We hope it will attract proposals from scholars interested in approaching the material-discursive dimensions of food rhetorics from myriad methodological and theoretical points of view and from varied entry points. In addition to claim-driven academic chapters, we are also open to reviewing genres that depart from traditional academic writing. We are open to considering creative writing pieces, multimodal projects, visual designs, pedagogical projects, and more. If you have a creative idea you’d like to explore for this edited collection, please contact us with any questions you may have.
Submission Details
Interested authors should submit a chapter proposal of no more than 500-words, along with a two-page CV, via this google Google Form.
As editors, we are invested in a transparent and supportive review process that is informed by Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices. If you have questions or would like to pitch an idea prior to formally submitting a proposal, feel free to contact the editors.
Timeline
-
Chapter proposals due: January 15, 2027
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Authors notified: February 15, 2027
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Submit to proposal + abstracts to publisher: March 15, 2027
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Full chapter draft: August 1, 2027
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Feedback on chapter drafts: October 15, 2027
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Revised full chapter draft: January 15, 2028
References
Eckstein, L., & Conley, A. (2020). Cookery: Food rhetorics and social production. University of Alabama Press.
Frye, J. & Bruner, M. (2012). The rhetoric of food: Discourse, materiality, and power. Routledge.
Goldthwaite, M. A. (Ed.). (2017). Food, feminisms, and rhetorics. Southern Illinois University Press.
Hanganu-Bresch, C. (2022). The rhetoric of food as medicine: Introduction to the special issue on the rhetoric of food as medicine. Rhetoric of Health & Medicine, 4.2, pp. 111–125, DOI: 10.5744/rhm.2021.2001.
Moeller, M. & Frost, E. (2016). Food fights: Cookbook rhetorics, monolithic constructions of womanhood, and field narratives in technical communication. Technical Communication Quarterly, 25:1, 1-11, DOI: 10.1080/10572252.2016.1113025.
Stokes, A. Q. & Atkins-Sayre, W. (2016). Consuming identity: The role of food in redefining the south. University Press of Mississippi.
Zachary Beare, Ph.D. | he/him/his
Director, First Year Writing Program
Associate Professor, Department of English
North Carolina State University
zbeare
Co-Editor, Composition Studies
https://compstudiesjournal.com/