curated by Dylan Gordon

“A Real Queer Fish”: Oysters, Mashers, and Homoerotic Appetites in Tipping the Velvet
Abi Dennis, English

Sarah Waters’s neo-Victorian novel, Tipping the Velvet (1998), follows the picaresque adventures of Nancy Astley, a seemingly artless and somewhat naive English oyster girl with a passion for the music halls. In this presentation, I discuss and analyse the novel’s representations of food and eating in terms of literary technique, and examine their contribution to the author’s broader goals for her work. Through use of the oyster and other gustatory tropes, Waters’s illustrates the functions and effects of appetite, the formation and expression of power relationships, and the making and remaking of gender.

We Are What We Eat: Diet, Health, and Becoming Human in Bioanthropological Perspective
L. Elizabeth Doyle, Anthropology

Diet and nutrition lie at the heart of human ecology, society, and biological function: much of human action centres on food, food choices, and food consumption. By the same token, many of our most pervasive health threats relate to nutritional imbalances. Looking back in time, we find that the major features of human evolution – hominin group society, subsistence technology, and food production – articulate with the daily quest for food. I will review how biological anthropologists infer diet and nutritional health in the past, and help to reconstruct the social organization of subsistence – the food politics, as it were, of the ancient world.

Edible Activism: Understanding Scale and Networks in Social Movement Mobilization and Action
Charles Z. Levkoe, Geography and Planning

Over the past decade, there has been a significant expansion of alternative food initiatives (AFIs) in Canada in both number and scope. Are alternative food initiatives addressing core issues of social justice and environmental sustainability, or are they simply complicit in a project of neoliberalization? I draw on the case of The Stop Community Food Centre and its Community Food Centre approach to illustrate the theoretical developments and applications behind evolving sustainable and just food praxis.

WIDEN (Workshops for Inter-Discipline Exchange & Novelty) aims to reveal the shared projects and symbiotic insights emerging from the manifold knowledge bases of the University of Toronto.

On Rehabilitation April 23 2010
On Food April 9 2010
On Mining March 26 2010
On Movement March 10 2010
On Expertise February 26 2010
On HIV/AIDS February 10 2010
On Colour January 27 2010 (in bold defiance of midwinter)
On Women December 4 2009 (in commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the Montreal Massacre)
On Fidelity November 27 2009
On Walls November 9 2009 (in commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall)
On the Supernatural October 30 2009
On Voice April 29 2009
On Space April 14 2009
On Remembering Violence March 11 2009
On Vision February 25 2009
On Darwin February 11 2009
On Pleasure January 28 2009