This network has been established to allow researchers and policy makers located in Australia who are interested in the social and cultural aspects of food and eating to connect with each other. We hope this network will foster interdisciplinary projects and other research synergies.
The Australian Food, Society and Culture Network includes members from around Australia and also links to other related networks both within Australia and in other countries. Members of the network are from a wide range of disciplines, including the humanities and social sciences but also marketing, nutrition, medicine, public health and health policy.
Our members are interested in such topics as health, body weight, gender and sexual identity, the family, agriculture and food provisioning, the cross-cultural dimensions of food and eating, the portrayal of food and cooking in the media, the history of food, indigenous foodways and sustainable food systems.
The network particularly seeks to explore the ways in which food and eating practices can be examined critically and theorised using relevant socio-cultural theoretical perspectives.
The interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary nature of the network is reflected in several thematic groups representing our current membership's research interests. The thematic groups may meet individually, but the Australian Food, Society and Culture Network organises a meeting once a year in an annual workshop where all the thematic groups can come together to present research and exchange ideas.
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This interdisciplinary symposium explores changing food systems, practices, and futures in an age of multiple, overlapping crises. The speakers will investigate new ways of thinking about the relationship between ecology, food, culture, and health in an age of self-devouring growth, when environmental and social inequities are intensifying, and health concerns are amplified by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Keynote: Asking different questions: Leveraging ethnography to nourish people, health promotion and policy, Professor Megan Warin (University of Adelaide).
Download the 2022 Symposium Program (pdf, 708.9KB)
This one-day symposium examined emergent research methodologies in the study of food, nutrition, and diet. We looked at the ways in which new methodologies to examine food and food cultures have expanded, both with technologies of the digital age that reconfigure systems of food production and production, as well as new sensory (tactile/haptic, visual, olfactory), representational, cultural, and social practices that shape the food citizen. We also examined moving boundaries in the study of food, society, and culture through the lends of foodscape mapping, reflexive research methods, and indigenous/cross-cultural food pedagogies.
Download the 2019 Symposium Program (pdf, 873.5KB)
The aim of this one-day symposium was to present and discuss research on the relationships between eating, drinking, place and culture. We looked at the ways in which settings, places and habitats construct opportunities for old and new forms of alimentation and cultural significance. The symposium presented research on the experiences of those who have been, by accident or design, displaced from their foodways. The event included an interactive 'dessert-in-hand' food experience hosted by Post Dining. In the afternoon a workshop was held to discuss the research and actions for the network in 2019.
