INVITE: Be part of our conference panel “Mapping the Edible City” !

Please allow us to remind you of our 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, The British Museum, the Royal Geographical Society and SOAS University of London.

Our panel, Mapping the Edible City: Making visible communities and food spaces in the city, is convened by Ferne Edwards (RMIT), Katrin Bohn (UoB) and André Viljoen (UoB). It welcomes inputs from anthropologists, geographers and other disciplines engaged with urban space to explore the emergence and possibilities for urban food mapping practices. We seek papers/contributions 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, space-use conflicts, gender, migration, the senses, ecology, productivity, 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 panel’s abstract below, and submit a 250-word abstract proposal by 8th January 2020 via the online form, which can be found here. If you have any questions for the convenors ahead of submitting, please email ferne.edwards@rmit.edu.au.

We aim for dissemination of the panel’s presentations after the conference. Depending on the type of submissions we receive, we will let you know – and are happy to discuss – what this will be: a journal issue, an exhibition, a book…

Abstract of our call for contributions/papers:
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 many, by engaging different perspectives, topics, tempos and mobilities. Traditionally based in geography due to an 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 which enrich current urban design and planning studies with complex and surprising findings. Urban food practices, a topic of increasing interest to all, urban design, anthropology and geography due to increasing urbanisation, environmental concerns, precarity and a desire to reconnect to nature and to one’s food source, are also prolific in uptaking new mapping styles. Using GIS and other forms of artist, participatory and community mapping, amongst others, food mapping provides a rich arena in which to apply mapping as a tool to communicate new ways of understanding urban space, identities, relationships, informal and alternative economies, mobilities, and connections in and across the city. This panel seeks papers and other contributions 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, space-use conflicts, gender, migration, the senses, ecology, productivity, and home/place-making through food.

For information on the conference see the conference’s website.

For more information on our panel see the Bohn&Viljoen website.

Image: Mapping food and its producers in an urban district in the City of Cologne, Germany, as part of the DQE urban regeneration project Urbane Agrikultur in Köln-Ehrenfeld. (source: Bohn&Viljoen Architects and DQE 2011)