[Commlist] CFP: Picturing food: Visualizing food culture through images and stories

*CFP: Picturing food: Visualizing food culture through images and stories

  *Imaginations - Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies (open access 
and peer-reviewed)**

  <https://imaginationsjournal.ca/index.php/imaginations 
<https://imaginationsjournal.ca/index.php/imaginations>>
**Extended deadline for abstract submission: January 30th, 2026*
*
In this call, we seek accounts and theorizations of research and 
everyday projects that discuss the critical perspectives on food images 
and visual narratives. We aim to draw on food’s narrative power to 
determine the various aspects of food storytelling in the past, present, 
and future, which reflect the values of people, cultures, and regions. 
We seek to integrate perspectives on food to examine the everydayness of 
food and its capacity to explore the human world.

This special issue will bring together submissions from the arts, 
humanities, and sociology, including but not limited to cultural 
studies, food studies, media studies, and visual culture. We aim to 
generate approaches, examples, and provocations to address the renewed 
racialized, gendered, colonial, economic, social, cultural, and/or 
political power dynamics in food imagery and storytelling.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

  *
    Social media and food representations (e.g. TikTok food creators,
    mukbang videos)
  *
    Perspectives on printed food publications (e.g. cookbooks, food
    magazines, menu cards, recipe cards, brochures)
  *
    Perspectives on digital food publications (e.g. food blogs, food
    magazines)
  *
    Food photography and images
  *
    Food representations from the Global North and the Global South
  *
    Food symbols and meaning-making
  *
    Visualization of hunger, nourishment, and insecurity
  *
    Food and culinary tourism and culinary arts
  *
    Migrant workers, immigrants, and food
  *
    Gender and food
  *
    Race and food
  *
    Climate change and food
  *
    Food packaging, retail images, and consumption
  *
    The kitchen object world and kitchen tools
  *
    Digital food formats (e.g. digital menu cards, food ordering
    applications)
  *
    Food editorial practices and publications
  *
    Representations of food at home and in the diaspora
  *
    Reconceptualizing of ethnic and othered foods (e.g. Social media
    creators recreating recipes)
  *
    Place or region-specific food narratives
  *
    Food sustainability and green food practices
  *
    Perspectives on plant-based or animal food practices

Background
Today, we use food to tell stories about culture, ethnicity, family, 
identity, and religion around the world. Food storytelling encompasses 
branded imagery, digital products, film, photography, and publications. 
Food's ordinary everydayness makes it a quintessential object for 
studying its intervention in society and its nuanced functioning in the 
human world (Curtin & Heldke 1992). Its socio-cultural character enables 
the examination of the relationship between people, communities, and 
cultures, and the meanings they construct through food in a continuously 
evolving world (Murcott 1996).
Food is a source of power, memory, and identity, as well as a 
communication system of beliefs, practices, values, and meanings 
(Barthes 1961/2008; Corvo 2016). Food imagery is more potent and more 
communicative in today’s visually dominated world as it is present 
across all communication mediums, including advertisements, films, 
journalism, digital platforms, and social media (Mitchell 1995). Food 
imagery not only captures appetizing meals in pictures but also 
reproduces aspects of reality, including food production, hunger, and 
insecurity in newspapers (Bourdieu 1999), as well as gender portrayals 
in magazines and television shows (Parasecoli 2005; Rhee 2019).
Pictorial representations of food facilitate the transmission of stories 
and visual messages in various contexts, enabling image consumers to 
perceive, create, and interpret meaning (Berger 1972). This polysemic 
power of food images empowers the production and spread of marginalized 
stories in diasporic communities, the re-conceptualization of ethnic 
foods, and the concepts of appropriating and consuming ethnicity 
(Barthes 1961/2008; Parasecoli 2014; Ray 2017) as well as the evolving 
landscape of food and culinary tourism (Everett 2008). Visual 
stimulations also highlight the hegemonic power struggles between 
mainstream or accepted foods and ethnic or “othered” foods, which 
represent historically marginalized communities and their cultural 
histories (Stano 2015). Building on current work, this issue examines a 
range of critical interventions that explore the intricacies of food’s 
everyday-ness, its meaning-making characteristics, and its commentary on 
society.
Submission Process
Contributions may include: research articles or manifestos (4,000-6,000 
words), video essays, multimedia research-creation pieces, exhibition 
and book reviews (approx. 1,500 words), or snackables (short academic 
essays of approx. 1000 to 2000 words).
*_No payments will be required from authors._*
Contributions may be in English or French, and if you would like to 
submit a piece in any other language, please contact us. Email your 
300-word abstract by *_January 30, 2026_*, and/or enquiries to:

(_antara24 /at/ yorku.ca) <mailto:(antara24 /at/ yorku.ca)>_ (Antara Dey)
For information on submission guidelines, please refer to: 
_https://imaginationsjournal.ca/index.php/imaginations/submission_guidelines 
<https://imaginationsjournal.ca/index.php/imaginations/submission_guidelines>_
References**
Barthes, Roland. “Towards A Psychology of Contemporary Food 
Consumption”, /Food and Culture: A reader /(3rd ed.), edited by Carole 
Counihan and Penny Van Esterik. Routledge. 2013. pp. 50-62 (Original 
work published in 1961)

Berger, John./ Ways of Seeing/. Penguin. 1972.

Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Social Definition of Photography”, /Visual 
Culture: The Reader/, edited by Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall. Sage. 
1999. pp. 287-318.

Corvo, Paolo. /Food Culture, Consumption and Society/. London: Palgrave 
Macmillan, 2015.

Curtin, Deane W., and Lisa M. Heldke, editors. /Cooking, Eating, 
Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food/. Vol. 704. Indiana 
University Press, 1992.

Everett, Sally. "Beyond The Visual Gaze? The Pursuit of an Embodied 
Experience Through Food Tourism." /Tourist Studies 8.3/ (2008):. 337-358.

Mitchell, William John Thomas. /Picture theory: Essays on Verbal and 
Visual Representation/. University of Chicago Press. 1995.

Murcott, Anne. (1996). “Food as an Expression of Identity”, /The Future 
of The Nation-state/, edited by Sverker Gustavsson and Leif Lewin. 
Routledge. 1996. pp. 49-77.

Parasecoli, Fabio. "Feeding Hard Bodies: Food and Masculinities in Men's 
Fitness Magazines." /Food and Foodways/ 13.1-2 (2005): 17-37.

Parasecoli, Fabio. "Food, Identity, and Cultural Reproduction in 
Immigrant Communities." /Social Research: An International 
Quarterly/ 81.2 (2014): 415-439.

​​Ray, Krishnendu. "Bringing The Immigrant Back Into The Sociology of 
Taste." /Appetite/ 119 (2017): 41-47.

Rhee, Jooyeon. "Gender Politics in Food Escape: Korean Masculinity in TV 
Cooking Shows in South Korea." /Journal of Popular Film and 
Television/ 47.1 (2019): 56-64.

Stano, Simona. "Semiotics of Food." /International handbook of 
semiotics/. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2015. pp. 647-671.


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