Frist: 15.11.2024
- Examples from different countries, including comparative perspectives, that allow for critical insights into the political economy of food charity. What influence does the capitalist food system, i.e., the entire process of production, processing, distribution, and consumption of food, have on the dominant national forms of food charity? What are the ecological implications of food charity for new forms of waste management and a more sustainable food system in general? And what effects do different welfare regimes, in particular the specific arrangement of social assistance and minimum income policies, have on the way the “new charity economy” operates?
- Critical engagements with the political visions within food charity and their underlying promises. What kind of (new) politics do they imagine? Which struggles do they address, and what are the material and affective investments?
- Presentations that critically engage with the symbolic and material struggles over food and food charity. What is the role of food in food charity, and how do ascriptions to food and social positionings relate? How are some people affectively attached to food that others do not consider buying? What affects stick to food charity, and how do they relate, for instance, to the shaming and stigmatizing of food bank visitors?
- Submissions exploring the intersectional gendered dynamics of volunteering. In which ways do women’s presumed virtues such as empathy and care (still) operate as resources of the (restructured) welfare state? How does food charity mirror a gendered, racialized, and class-related division of labor? And what role do affects and emotions play within these dynamics?
- Contributions that engage, more generally, with affect and how affects circulate within food charity. What affective states emerge in food charity, and what methodologies and epistemologies can help in grasping them?
- Critical engagements with the structural failures of the welfare state in view of preventing poverty for everyone. What kind of practices of collective care and solidarity related to food sovereignty have been invented by those who have historically been excluded from or marginalized by the welfare state, both in and beyond the Global North? In which ways can these inventions contribute to thinking about new ways for fighting poverty and enhancing food sovereignty?
- Contributions that conceptualize the contemporary political and affective economy of food charity and its struggles. What kind of critique is necessary within this constellation between a politics of survival and the need for structural transformation?
We welcome contributions from disciplines such as Political Science, Critical Political Economy, Sociology, Social Work, Education, Critical Geography, Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Affect Studies, and Religious Studies. Please send your abstract of 300 – max. 350 words (excl. references) and a short bio-note to contact.foodcharity@wu.ac.at by 15 November 2024. Contributors will be notified by 13 December 2024.
Organizers: Brigitte Bargetz, Markus Griesser, and Jessica Gasior, Institute for Sociology and Social Research, WU Vienna Location: WU Campus, Welthandelsplatz 1, 1020 Vienna More information: www.foodcharity-affectivestate.net Contact: Jessica Gasior (contact.foodcharity@wu.ac.at)