Call for Papers: Georgetown University Round Table 2025: Language and Food, 28 February – 2 March 2025, Georgetown University, Washington D.C. Deadline: 18 November 2024.
Food and language are omnipresent and intertwined in everyday life. We use language to talk about food, and food terms have rich cultural histories and associations. Menus and food packaging labels not only provide windows on an item’s nature and quality, but also often signal association with identities such as ethnicity, region, or class. Mealtime has long been a privileged site for the study of language in use, as people talk while they eat, and while they cook. Parents use language to socialize their children into food preferences and practices; even among adults, the taste of food is collaboratively negotiated in interaction: think wine tasting, or dinner conversation. Children in school cafeterias and co-workers in workplace break rooms talk about food. People participate in online forums on topics such as gourmet cooking, veganism, and weight loss; they use language about food to portray themselves as certain kinds of people (gourmand, disciplined eater, environmentalist, picky eater, athlete). People post photos of food on Instagram, recipe videos on TikTok and Facebook, and restaurant reviews on Yelp. Food is a necessity and a luxury; it is intertwined with identities (e.g., cultural, gendered, socioeconomic, political, religious), relationships (e.g., parent-child, friend-friend, host-guest), and values (e.g., healthful eating, ethical eating), all of which are negotiated through language.
GURT 2025 will bring together diverse scholars whose work explores intersections between language and food. The conference will be inclusive of multiple approaches, including (but not limited to) interactional sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, multimodal discourse analysis, ethnography of communication, cultural discourse analysis, narrative analysis, variation analysis, semiotics, systemic functional linguistics, historical linguistics, comparative linguistics, computational/corpus linguistics, and cognitive linguistics. We invite submissions that consider any aspect of food and language, including (but not limited to) menus, recipes, mealtime conversations, food-related online discussions, social media posts about food, food-related podcasts, food advertisements, and documentary and reality TV shows about food.
Center for Intercultural Dialogue 