Food, Hunger and Conflict (topic)
When in today’s world we are confronted with the suffering of the hungry, we see them as victims in need of support, whether we pass them in the street or see distant strangers on the news. The study of the concept of hunger has shown that we cannot take this vision for granted. James Vernon indicated that it is the result of history of changing ideas surrounding the concept of hunger. Whilst it once was seen as the unavoidable hand of God, this later changed to a discourse of morality and individual responsibility. Those without food were seen as lacking discipline and in need of education.
The foregoing indicates that a need arises to understand definitions of what hunger represented for both those with and those without access to food to comprehend social and cultural interactions and political operations. Research into different sources can shed light on how existing ideas on poverty and hunger interacted with discourses and perceptions, strategies for survival, charity and aid to grasp what it meant economically, politically but also socially and culturally to be without food during times of prosperity, shortages, conflict and war. Through the mediation of the study of hunger strikes for example, one can study relationships of power, frameworks of culturally defined ideas of resistance, bodily integrity, sacrifice and social dynamics. Different experiences and cultural framing have significant effects on perception and remembrance of hunger, power, poverty and war.
Date: Friday, 16 January – Saturday 17 January 2015
Venue: Aula of the University of Amsterdam, Singel 411, 1012 XM Amsterdam.
Friday, 16 January 2015
- Chair: Josep L. Barona
- Taja Kramberger: Starvation politics in extremis. Food-Regime in the Nazi Concentration Camps
- Ian Miller: Force feeding, conflict and medical ethics, 1909-2013
- Chair: Anneke Geyzen
- Augustine Sedgewick: The hunger plantation
- Sander Tetteroo: Hunger, philanthropy and the state in colonial Indonesia
14:15 – 15:30 Panel 3 – Solutions for hunger? Community strategies
- Chair: Natalie Scholz
- John Bohstedt: Can food riots win food security? Provision politics from early modern Europe to the crises of 2008
- Ingrid de Zwarte: Save the children. Social self-organization and domestic relief in Amsterdam during the Dutch food crisis, 1944-1946
Saturday, 17 January 2015
10:00 – 10:20 Garrelt Verhoeven: Crisis in the kitchen : wartime cookbooks at the University of Amsterdam
10:20 – 12:00 Panel 4 – Living with hunger: representations and creative solutions
- Chair: Irene Zwiep
- Richard Delerins: Rethinking “Famine bread” in the late 18th century France and during the French Revolution
- Vicky Hayward: Spain’s Hunger Culture: Picaros, Protestors and Cooks
- Charlotte Boyce: ‘ The Whole World One Kin’. Sympathy, Charity, and Kinship in Victorian Representations of the Irish Famine
12:00 – 12:15 Wrap-up Irene Zwiep
Call for Papers
Abstract submission is closed.
For the CfP please look here: Call for Papers 2015.
The Amsterdam Symposium on the History of Food has been made possible with the generous support of Amsterdam University Fund, Amsterdam School for Culture and History of the University of Amsterdam, the Social & Cultural Food Studies (FOST) research unit of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the Doctoral School of Human Sciences of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.