science and culture

Food is a basic foundation of culture and society, it is vital to our health and well-being and it plays a significant role in our everyday creative engagement with nature. The shifts in activities surrounding food acquisition, preparation and consumption are not only essential for learning a culinary tradition but for examining a broader societal change.

This conference will explore food as a complex cultural product, an indicator of social, religious and political identity. It will focus on people's relationship with food and discuss how food choices are determined by historical period, region, class, gender, kinship and/or ethnicity.

The conference seeks to explore the past and current status of gender identity around the world, to examine the ways in which society is shaped by gender and to situate gender in relation to the full scope of human affairs. Papers are invited on topics related, but not limited, to:

Decay as a state of nature is inevitable, yet it is something that could be at least postponed: decay in art as the main decadent idea has been on the cultural front row long enough to make certain conclusions about its essential characteristics. Decay as a philosophical issue is much more complex than its natural incarnation: French Symbolists and, later, fin de siècle authors regarded decay as an inseparable part of any type of cultural cognition. Its original interpretations can be found in the ideas of Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Nietzsche, Wagner, Bergson’s intuitivism, modern scientific discoveries and folklore. The art of decay feels the need to justify its aesthetic principles, to explain to the public audience its goals and tasks.

Applying diverse methods from across subject disciplines the conference will explore fashion and style in wide-ranging contexts. It will examine connections between fashion, body and culture and will focus on dress, cosmetics, coiffure and body alterations (piercing, tattooing, circumcision, aesthetic surgery, etc). 

How does our dress or hair style create our identity and status? How is it concerned with sexual and body politics? Is the desire to be "in fashion" universal or unique to Western culture? These and other questions we set out to discuss at the conference.

Papers are invited on topics related, but not limited, to:

Over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st, cinema, television, and related media have become increasingly central both to individual lives and to the lives of peoples, groups, and nations. Cinema has become a major form of cultural expression and films both reflect and influence the attitudes and behaviour of people, representing their tensions and anxieties, hopes and desires and incarnating social and cultural determinants of the era in which they were made.