Call for papers: Immigration, Immigrants, Agriculture and Food in North America

Call for papers: Immigration, Immigrants, Agriculture and Food in North America

Edited by: Julian Agyeman and Sydney Giacalone, Tufts University.

Overview

In a recent OpEd in the Boston Globe entitled “Trump Spills the Beans on Who Grows Americans’ Food”, we described how the new US administration’s immigration policies can create an opportunity for dialog about the intersections between immigration, immigrants, agriculture and food. Around 2 million of the people who plant US crops and pick fruit are undocumented, accounting for fully 50 to 70 percent of total US farm workers. Others are food chain workers in food production, distribution and restaurants.

In this book we will investigate this immigration-food nexus at two levels, the policy level, and the personal and cultural/community level.

First, we will look at the macro level, at immigration policies, food and agriculture. How have these dynamics played out historically and within contemporary politics in North America? The US has a markedly different ideological approach to immigration than Canada. Mexico, since the Bracero Program of the 1940s, has been seen as a ‘sending’ nation. What has been the effect of these differing national ideologies and policies towards immigration, on food and agriculture? How have food and immigration discourses been able to silence dialogue between each other, and what has this silence meant for conversations around justice?

Second, we will look at the micro level, at immigrant foodways. Foodways are manifestations and symbols of cultural histories and proclivities. As individuals participate in culturally defined ways of eating, they perform their own identities and memberships in particular groups. How important are foodways as performances, on immigrant lived and daily practices, and what impact do they have on the wider, intercultural communities they inhabit?

The following two guiding questions will form the two sections of the book:

“What has been the effect of North America’s differing national ideologies and policies towards immigration, on food and agriculture, and vice versa?”

and

“How important are foodways as performances on immigrant lived and daily practices, and what impact do they have on the wider, intercultural communities they inhabit?”

In practice, we want to know how these macro-scale (immigration as policy) and micro-scale (immigrants as food actors) issues interplay in order to better understand the role of immigration and immigrants in North American (US, Canadian and Mexican) food systems.

Abstract submission

If you feel you can contribute to either of our guiding questions, please submit an abstract to Julian.agyeman@tufts.edu and to Sydney.giacalone@tufts.edu by August 1 2017. Abstracts should be no more than 400 words in length and include the name and contact information of the author(s), including institutional affiliation and email address. Selected authors will be notified by the end of September 2017 and will be invited to contribute a full-length chapter (approximately 30 pages in length or 8000 words by the end of December 2017 with a final manuscript delivery by the end of July 2018.

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