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Our eighth international critical dietetics conference is now over. I encourage everyone who presented in Montgomery, Alabama to submit their work to the Journal of Critical Dietetics for consideration under one of the Journal sections.

As well, stay tuned for information coming up about our ninth international conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada in 2019.

Transformative is the word I keep coming back to as I describe my experience in Montgomery, Alabama last weekend during our 8th International Conference. Not only was the conference itself memorable with a rich slate of student presentations on Friday morning, to the incredible range of speakers during the People’s Tribunal on Friday afternoon, followed with an inspiring dinner at Martha’s Place, and then finally our day on Saturday where it was simply session after session of critically meaningful work being shared by those in person and those attending virtually. It was Sunday, during the civil rights tour led by Dr. Evelyn Crayton that the experience reached a visceral level. From a visit to the first all-Black university in Tuskegee, a tour of the Equal Justice Institute’s museum and then memorial (from which the photo below was taken), to an impromptu speech by Linda Blackmon Lowery at the foot of the Pettus Bridge in Selma (Linda was a 14-year old participant in the horror of Bloody Sunday); we were transformed. Thank you to everyone who made it possible to be in Montgomery including Danita Stapleton, our conference lead and her amazing team. Thank you to Evelyn Crayton who remained steadfast in her convictions to host Critical Dietetics in Alabama. Thank you to Jill White who brought a bus load of students from Dominican University in Chicago after teaching them a course that culminated in a final presentation at Critical Dietetics, plus organized a most memorable People’s Tribunal. And, thank you to our keynote speaker, Minnie Bruce Pratt who shared her stories and reminded us that the power of words to unlock the memory chambers that embolden us all.

Dr. Catherine Gillespie is conducting research on eating disorder recovery. She asked to share this invitation with you to share with your networks. Here is Dr. Gillespie’s message:

As a follow-up to my 2018 book entitled Putting Together the Puzzle Pieces of Full Eating Disorder Recovery, I am conducting an anonymous research survey on the characteristics and behaviors of people in eating disorder recovery. I am hoping that you might consider making this link available or sending it directly to those in eating disorder recovery so that they can share their experience and contribute to awareness of the good news of eating disorder recovery. Everyone can use the same link. It takes about 15 minutes to fill out, although it is possible to spend longer if desired. Participants must be 18 years old. The first page of the survey is an informed consent form. Here’s the link: http://drake.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6W5juzg86q9R71P

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Catherine Wilson Gillespie, Ph.D.
Professor and Associate Dean
Drake University School of Education
Collier Scripps Room 230
515.271.4602

Hello,

Here is the final version of our Montgomery conference program. We are looking forward to an absolutely wonderful array of speakers and sessions including our keynote speaker, Dr. Minnie Bruce Pratt.

Critical Dietetics Final Conference Program

Registration is open and our early-bird deadline is Oct. 14. Complete this form and email it to Jacqui Gingras in order to qualify for registration discounts.

2018.09.16 Conference Registration Form

Wow! I am hoping this begins an annual tradition – the Critical Dietetics Conference Official T-shirt. Students from Dominican University in Chicago have designed this shirt to sell in order to support their travel from Chicago to Montgomery. Please place your order today! It would be amazing to see attendees wearing these on Friday at the People’s Tribunal. You can even show your support if you are not planning on attending. Thank you!

Welcome to our new Journal of Critical Dietetics website hosted by Scholars Portal. This site will enable much greater access than our previous site. We look forward to your submissions.

We are delighted to announce the following call for abstracts for a Journal of Critical Dietetics special issue entitled:

Against Healthisms: Challenging the Paradigm of “Eating Right”

In much of food studies, public health, and medicine among other disciplines and professional fields, there appears to be a ubiquitous and seemingly anodyne embrace of the “imperative of health” (Lupton, 1995). Metzl (2010) explains “…‘health’ is a term replete with value judgments, hierarchies, and blind assumptions that speak as much about power and privilege as they do about well-being. Health is a desired state, but it is also a prescribed state and an ideological position” (p. 1-2). We, as scholars of Critical Dietetics, heed the call to trouble and contest the concept of “health”, while at the same time we recognize that profound social inequities exist around the pursuit and delivery of health and wellbeing. The persistence of these inequities demand that we take a critical stance against health, healthisms, and normative framings of “eating right”. This collection will question how health is defined, who gives and receives health, for what purposes, through what means, and to what ends, with a specific focus on diet, nutrition, and “eating right”. We contend that within a heightened neoliberal fervour to promote health comes an uneasy reluctance to question the moral grounds on which health and eating resides. We recognize the stigmatizing, colonizing, normalizing, medicalizing, and consumerist rhetoric that permeates health and eating discourses and the creation and promotion of dietetic knowledge. Scholarly critiques following few or many strands could complicate the cultural or systemic dedication to dominant nutritional rhetoric and reveal counter-hegemonic discourses that enable critical questions to emerge regarding the moral imperative towards health through eating practices (Lupton, 2017). We proceed on the premise that the concept of “health”, particularly as it pertains to “healthy eating”, is not immune to excavation of the “…ideologies, structures, base pairs, and blind assumptions involved in its construction” (Metzl and Kirkland, 2010, p. 4-5). Topics in this collection may cover but are not limited to the following: the white-washing of dietary advice, fat phobia and healthy eating discourse, ableism and “eating right”, beyond nutricentric food discourse, and queering “healthy eating”.

With this in mind, we issue a call for abstracts for a special issue of Against Healthisms: Challenging the Paradigm of “Eating Right” to appear in the September 2019 issue of the Journal of Critical Dietetics. Please submit a 300- to 500-word abstract regarding your position “against healthisms” for review by November 15, 2018. Email abstract submissions to Alissa Overend. The authors of successful abstracts will be notified by December 15, 2018. Full papers (up to 5000 words) will be expected by April 15, 2019 and will undergo full peer review prior to publication.

References

Lupton, D. (2017). Digital health: Critical and cross-disciplinary perspectives. London: Routledge.

Lupton (1995). The imperative of health: Public health and the regulated body, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Ltd.

Metzl, J. (2010). “Introduction”, In, Metzl, J., & Kirkland, A. R. (eds). Against health: How health became the new morality. New York: New York University Press.

Deadlines

Abstracts Due: November 15, 2018
Abstracts Reviewed: December 15, 2018
Full papers Due: April 15, 2019
Peer Review Due: May 15, 2019
Congress (Vancouver): June 1-7, 2019
Edited Papers Due: June 15, 2019
Publication: September 2019

Guest Editors

Alissa Overend, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, MacEwan University
Adele Hite, North Carolina State University
Andrea Noriega, Carleton University
Meredith Bessey, Mount Saint Vincent University

Call for Abstracts – Against Healthisms (PDF)