Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 2025: Language and Food
GURT 2025: Language and Food

Date: 28-Feb-2025 – 02-Mar-2025
Location: Washington, DC, USA
Contact Person: Cynthia Gordon
Meeting Email: gurt@georgetown.edu
Web Site: https://gurt.georgetown.edu/gurt-2025/

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics; Discourse Analysis; General Linguistics; Sociolinguistics

Call Deadline: 18-Nov-2024

Meeting Description:

Food and language are omnipresent and intertwined in everyday life. We use language to talk about food, and food terms have rich cultural histories and associations. Menus and food packaging labels not only provide windows on an item’s nature and quality, but also often signal association with identities such as ethnicity, region, or class. Mealtime has long been a privileged site for the study of language in use, as people talk while they eat, and while they cook. Parents use language to socialize their children into food preferences and practices; even among adults, the taste of food is collaboratively negotiated in interaction: think wine tasting, or dinner conversation. Children in school cafeterias and co-workers in workplace break rooms talk about food. People participate in online forums on topics such as gourmet cooking, veganism, and weight loss; they use language about food to portray themselves as certain kinds of people (gourmand, disciplined eater, environmentalist, picky eater, athlete). People post photos of food on Instagram, recipe videos on TikTok and Facebook, and restaurant reviews on Yelp. Food is a necessity and a luxury; it is intertwined with identities (e.g., cultural, gendered, socioeconomic, political, religious), relationships (e.g., parent-child, friend-friend, host-guest), and values (e.g., healthful eating, ethical eating), all of which are negotiated through language.

GURT 2025 will bring together diverse scholars whose work explores intersections between language and food. The conference will be inclusive of multiple approaches, including (but not limited to) interactional sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, multimodal discourse analysis, ethnography of communication, cultural discourse analysis, narrative analysis, variation analysis, semiotics, systemic functional linguistics, historical linguistics, comparative linguistics, computational/corpus linguistics, and cognitive linguistics. We invite submissions that consider any aspect of food and language, including (but not limited to) menus, recipes, mealtime conversations, food-related online discussions, social media posts about food, food-related podcasts, food advertisements, and documentary and reality TV shows about food. Plenary speakers include Elinor Ochs and Tamar Kremer-Sadlik, Martha Sif Karrebæk, Alla Tovares, and Camilla Vásquez.

Call for Papers:

We invite submissions that consider any aspect of food and language, in the following formats:
Regular conference-style papers (20 mins presentation + 10 mins discussion)
Colloquiums (2 hours 15 mins in length)
Posters: Presenters are expected to display posters (a brief text mixed with some visuals including charts, graphs, tables, images, and diagrams) that can facilitate discussion.

Abstracts should be a maximum of 300 words in length. To preserve anonymity during the peer-review process, authors should not include their names or reveal their identity anywhere in the abstract, including the references and the pdf document properties when there is one. Participants may be the sole author or the first author for no more than one abstract. However, there is no limit to the number of co-authored abstracts one may submit, or to the number of panel sessions an individual may participate in.

Paper & Poster Submissions: You will be asked for author information, the title, an abstract (of not more than 300 words); an abbreviated abstract (of not more than 500 characters) for inclusion in the program, and 3-5 keywords

Colloquium Submissions: You will be asked for author information, the title of colloquium, the abstract for the colloquium (of not more than 300 words), and an abbreviated abstract (of not more than 500 characters) for the colloquium (for inclusion in the program). In the pdf document you upload to the system, include the following: information about the organization of the colloquium (use of time, including for papers, any opening/closing remarks, discussant comments, Q&A period), and for each paper, the title and abstract (of not more than 300 words), along with an abbreviated abstract (of not more than 500 characters) for inclusion in the program.

Review Criteria

Review criteria include promise of novel and productive contribution to the study of language and food; clarity and evidence of a well-organized, engaging presentation; and contribution to the conference’s diversity of theories, methods, and data sources/types.

Submit here: https://login.easychair.org/cfp/gurt2025