In humanities, food, feeding, and feedback come together under one umbrella of human nature, culture, and creativity. Within this context fall the ethical, epistemological, phenomenological, and political tropes of food, calling for understanding and interrogation.

Food as a thematic focus in art has acquired a wide range of meanings related to consumption and consumerism, the search for and the loss of identity, localization/globalization, and high/pop culture. In literature, food has also been used as a metaphor for gender roles, human desires, power dynamics, and social status.

From a cultural standpoint, food, feeding, and feedback intersect with identity construction and religious and social affiliation. In this respect, Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space explores and emphasizes the role of food in creating a sense of selfhood and empowerment. Food has always been and continues to be a factor of domination. Fanon's writings describe food as a form of everyday resistance against colonialism. We are rebelling as long as we continue to eat couscous every day. De Certeau beautifully described this in his book Living and Cooking, where he portrays everyday practices as everyday resistance. So, the aspect of colonialism and anti-colonial resistance in food is crucial.

From an aesthetic perspective, food, feeding, and feedback mesh with artistic production, reception, and perception.

In James Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, food becomes the substance on which the artist’s muse grows.

In the political arena, food, feeding, and feedback have always been at the heart of political agendas, strategies, and debates on food sovereignty and security. Politicians often use food as a tool to define human relations, given its intricate connection to power. In fact, political conflicts in the Global North have triggered global food shortage, causing price hikes and aggravating hunger in countries in the Global South, pushing vulnerable nations such as Somalia and Yemen towards a hunger catastrophe.

In the scientific field, food, feeding, and feedback emerge as a subject of inquiry into human nutrition, malnutrition, growth, undergrowth, and their effects and defects. In educational sciences, food is a recurrent motif and metaphor for processes of learning and assessment. In linguistics and media studies, food, feeding, and feedback offer wide opportunities for critical inquiry. For example, images and metaphors related to food and starvation stand as rich corpora for academic research, using inquiry traditions ranging from textual linguistics to semiotic and multi-modal frameworks. Other academic ramifications of linguistics, including sociolinguistics, stylistics, pragmatics, and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), may offer interesting contexts for in-depth investigations of the very theme.

Papers are invited to consider but are not limited to the following topics:

• Food and Identity Construction
• Food and Language
• Food and Idioms
• Food and Conditioning
• Food and Psychology
• Food and Trauma
• Food and Cultural Rituals
• Food and Religion
• Food and Society
• Food and Ethics
• Food and Agriculture
• Food and Rural Women
• Food in/and Literature
• Food and (In)justice
• Food (In)security
• Food and War
• Food as a Green Weapon
• The Politics and/or Poetics of Food
• The Politics/Poetics of Hunger
• The History Versus Story of Food
• Food, Feeding and Feedback in Education
• Food, Feeding, and Feedback in Media
• Feeding/Nurturing/and Feminist Studies

Email: foodfeedingfeedbackconference@gmail.com