UNISG visiting professor of Food Anthropology, Carole Counihan, will be one of three keynote speakers at the upcoming international conference, Food, Power & Meaning in the Middle East and the Mediterranean. The event will take place June 15-16, 2010, at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, in Israel.

The conference will explore the ways in which food and foodways partake in the production, reproduction, negotiation, and subversion of power and meaning in the Middle East and Mediterranean Regions. Over 30 speakers from around the world will take part and will discuss the culinary sphere as an active sphere of cultural production, as well as approach culinary artifacts as cultural icons and define different aspects of identity that highlight power and power relations as tangible social forces.

The keynote speakers are as follows:
Prof. Carole Counihan, Millersville University: Food Voice, Activism, and Power in Italy’s Slow Food Movement
Prof. Penny Van Esterik, York University: Nurturing Power: Food and Commensality in a Globalized World
Prof. Daphne Barak-Erez, Tel-Aviv University : Symbolic Constitutionalism: On Sacred Cows and Abominable Pigs

Additional sessions include:
The Culinary Negotiation of National Identity
Representation of Food & Power in the Media and Arts
Culinary Representations of Palestinian Identity in Israel
Who Eats Whom? Eating Globally
Feeding the Nation: State, Civil Society and Food Regulation
'Eat, Drink, Man, Woman'
Eating in the Diaspora
Food, Religion and Class
Historical Perspectives on Food and Power
Eating in Palestine during the British Mandate (1921-1948)

For more information, including locations, dates, and times, visit the conference website.