-----Original Message-----
From: Women's Studies List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Psyche A. WILLIAMS-FORSON
Sent: Tuesday, June 03, 2008 10:06 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: CFP: Gender, Food, and the Underground Economy

CFP: Gender, Food, and the Underground Economy

Special Issue edited by

Psyche Williams-Forson, University of Maryland College Park

Food Studies explores all aspects of relationships between food, culture, and society.  The movement of people and capital around the world necessitates that we explore the ways in which women interact with food through varying enterprises. Many of these activities are considered "off the books" or part of a shadow or underground economy. This alternative economic space usually involves otherwise law-abiding citizens who seek to provide for their families in ways that fall outside the formal economy.  These women and men may be avoiding taxes or simply choosing to render services without acquiring the proper licenses or food sanitation permits.  Whether they are bootleggers from the early twentieth-century, housewives who make tortillas at home and sell them to neighbors, women and women who sell home-cooked meals from non-authorized street stands, waitresses who underreport the night's tips, or undocumented immigrants working in the food sector, these people engage in a vital and sophisticated-albeit illegal-set of practices.

Submissions on women and/or men working in the underground food economy are sought for a special issue of Food and Foodways guest edited by Psyche Williams-Forson. We seek previously unpublished essays from all fields of the humanities and social sciences consisting of original scholarship on women who work with food in shadow economies. We especially favor research that speaks to an interdisciplinary audience and that presents arguments based on examination of data.

Papers should be twenty-five to thirty pages including references, word-processed double spaced, with pages numbered consecutively and margins of at least one inch on all sides.  Papers should be written in clear, accessible prose, cite relevant literature, and include an abstract of no more than 150 words.

Submissions are due January 31, 2009 by email (attached as a Word document) to [log in to unmask] If you would prefer to send by snail mail, please send to: Psyche Williams-Forson, Ph.D., Department of American Studies, University of Maryland College Park, 2103 Holzapfel Hall, College Park, Maryland 20742. Feel free to contact me for further information or with questions regarding ideas for submissions.

Editor bio: Psyche Williams-Forson is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland College Park. She is Humanities Book Review Editor for Food and Foodways, a refereed, interdisciplinary, and international journal devoted to publishing original scholarly articles on the history and culture, and the author of Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power. She is currently at work on a book project involving African American women who worked in unofficial food economies from the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries.