Psyche Williams-Forson
  • University of Maryland College Park

Beautifully Human and Very Complicated: Telling Stories of
Food and Race

Dr. Psyche Williams-Forson is Professor and Chair of the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland College Park. She examines the lives of African Americans living in the United States from the late 19th century to the present. In addition to several journal articles and book chapters, her work on material culture and food has been published in her books, Taking Food Public: Redefining Foodways in a Changing World and the award-winning Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, & Power. Her new book, Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America is forthcoming in spring 2022.

Queers Saving the Planetary Ecosystem: A Short History of
Earthworms

Yvette Abrahams holds a PhD in economic history from UCT, and has consulted for decades for NGOs and government. A former Commissioner for Gender quality, she steered programmes on poverty, energy and climate change. Dr Abrahams has also been an active academic, and has worked as a lecturer and researcher both in South Africa and the United states. She has published widely, with her best-known work being studies of Sara Baartman, research on lesbians and queer theory/politics and writings on gender and climate change. Dr Abrahams was one of the first feminists to address gender, feminism and climate change in South Africa. She has also been an organic farmer for several years, and currently runs a small business on her smallholding just outside Cape Town for producing carbo-neutral organic soap and body products.

Dr Yvette Abrahams
Shelley Barry
  • University of Johannesburg

Food. Film. Home: a filmmaker reflects

Shelley Barry is one of South Africa’s most innovative documentary film-makers, the winner of numerous awards and has had her films screened at festivals around the world. Currently a lecturer in documentary and experimental film and national cinema at the University of Johannesburg, she is also the director of her own company Twospinningwheels. Shelley Barry is well-known for her trilogy, Whole a Trinity of Being(2005), Diaries of a Dissident Poet (2014) and Here (2019). Barry’s films are distinctive in focusing on what is usually not seen or thought about. Food and eating – within human beings complex lives – is one example of this. This session will involve a screening of aspects of Barry’s work focusing on food, and will be followed by discussion.

Panel 13: Food and identity-formation

Session Chair: Heather Thuynsma

Black gay men’s status consumption of food as a construction of identities in South Africa: a literature review (2000-2020)

  • Brian Sibeko

Narratives of Identity and Belonging: Place and the everyday food practices of immigrant, Muslim, women living in Fordsburg, Johannesburg

  • Safia Bobat

Food consumption practices and social identity construction in South African soapies: A semiotic remediation discourse analysis of Skeem Saam

  • Nokukhanya P. Ndlovu

Panel 14: Food and identity-formation

Session Chair: Relebohile Moletsane

The edible woman: Ethnolinguistic reflections on names of Kiganda food

  • Sarah Nakijoba

If Meat be the Food of Love, Play on: An Appraisal of the Assamese Movie ‘Aamis’

  • Aparna Ajith

Mass and Social Media, Food and Navigating “Being Black and Middle Class” in South Africa

  • Pamella Gysman

Panel 15: Food in/and social history

Session Chair: Marshall Maposa

Rhizome networks: Turmeric’s journey from haldi doodh to turmeric latte

  • G. Paleker

Pakkies aan Boetie

  • Dominique Wnuczek-Lobaczewski

Panel 16: Local Words/Global Food Ways

Session Chair: Sheetal Bhoola

The Fast Foods Promise of Uber Eats Adverts – A Critical Analysis

  • Evans Anyona Ondigi

Good food in South Africa

  • ShariDaya
  • Heeten Bhagat
  • Molly Anderson

Indigenous knowledge for processing of local flora to Desert delicacy: Panchkutta

  • Dheeraj Singh
  • M K Chaudhary
  • Chandan Kumar
  • Aishwarya Dudi

Panel 17: Local worlds/Global foodways and foodscapes

Session Chair: Busi Alant

Repositioning strategies of fast-foodscapes during the Covid 19 pandemic: A multisemiotic discourse analysis of Nandos, KFC and Chicken Licken in South Africa

  • Lynn Mafofo

Co-operation in action: CSA as a pathway towards localised food systems

  • Nicola Coundourakis

Precarious contexts of foodwork: Urban Zimbabwean women at the frontline of political ecology struggles

  • Michelle Masuku

Panel 18: Food/Aesthetics/Politics

Session Chair: Marié-Heleen Coetzee

Exist to resist- resist to exist. Cape indigeneity: herb, fruit, land and people

  • Monique Tamara (van Vuuren)

Tasty type. Insights into the sensorial function(s) of type

  • Kyle Rath