Food studies faculty Pamela Runestad, assistant professor of anthropology, and Nina Namaste, professor of Spanish in the Department of World Languages and Cultures, presented at the Umbra Institute’s biennial food conference in Perugia, Italy, in June.
Runestad’s presentation, “Feeding Mothers, Making Citizens: Japanese Clinic Meals as Treatment, Care and Identity,” was based on her peer-reviewed article published in Verge: Studies in Global Asias fall 2023 special issue on food and foodways. Namaste’s presentation, “Delineating Identities: Teaching Food as a Marker and Transgressor of Boundaries,” was based on her forthcoming publication in Teaching Food & Literature (a Modern Languages Association volume) and on-campus course, IDS 2040 Edible Ideologies: Food, Power & Identity. Travel was supported by Elon College, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning.
The Umbra Institute food conference values the intersection between research and pedagogy and included three pedagogy sessions and several pedagogy-related individual papers. The theme this year was hybridity, and it provoked rich discussions about intersections, combinations and fusions. Runestad has participated and presented at the conference previously, while this was Namaste’s first time attending.
Runestad valued the focus on relationality and connection between people and places, particularly for applications within Asian Studies. Applying relationality to Japan (as opposed to often-used and problematic lenses of collectivism and group mindedness) helps explain socio-cultural trends in general. Relationality is also useful for teaching and conducting research in the anthropology of food because attention to place-based connections can address human factors in a way that a focus on the seasonality of food production cannot.
Namaste enjoyed the variety, depth and interdisciplinary nature of the research presented as well as learning about the extremely varied ways in which food studies courses are taught at other institutions.
Runestad and Namaste were also able to participate in a dinner event at Numero Zero, a restaurant that specializes in supporting neurodiversity in the community, and a tour of Perugia that highlighted the food history of Perugia as linked to local architecture and artistic expression.