Got some good advice from a professor, who recommended that I work on summarizing my dissertation project in twenty-five words or less. This advice became relevant after I tried to explain my project to my dentist. I oscillated between vague generalities and hyper-specialized research findings. Needless to say, I would make a horrible CNN contributor. So here are some dissertation soundbites. (I'll keep revising as my writing progresses).
Hopefully practicing this condensing method will help during job interviews, grant and fellowship applications, and most importantly help me explain to friends and family why I'm not an inane, overspecialized academic.
My dissertation project is about:
-the role that food images play in shaping our image of political, social, and economic systems that affect food production and consumption.
-the way food images can spice up the way we eat and grow food.
-cross-cultural food images that can provide new relationships among cultures, foodways, and vision.
-the way writers, communities, and nations visualize the role of food in social, political, and economic systems.
-how food images function as efficient statements about individual and collective identity
1/16/10
My dissertation, "Complex Foodscapes: Visualizing Cross-Cultural Networks through Food Images," studies the complex system of food images that help define our relationships with food. Food might be succulent, as in a juicy piece of meat. It might be exotic, as Thai food and Mexican food are often presented. Or, food might be comforting, like a hearty bowl of chili. The types and combinations of relationships with food are endless, but they remained constrained by our economic, political, and social relations. Putting food images from literature, cookbooks, and social movements in a broader cross-cultural context characteristic of today's global food system, I describe the way images both constrain our ways of perceiving food and liberate our vision to perceive new food worlds. In Chapter One, using the concept of emergence--a process in which novel food images emerge, or self-organize, from simple rules--I demonstrate how John Dryden's efforts to control the interpretation of his historical poem, Annus Mirabilis, as a type of advertisement for free trade and English nationalism unintentionally produces an image of a decentralized economic system based on the early modern spice trade. Against assumptions that Annus Mirabilis univocally reflects an imperialist politics, I draw attention to the images of decentralized systems that emerge out of Dryden's poem. Chapter Two...
