I've got – count 'em – two whole calls for participants about fat that want to hear from actual fat people.
As the three regular readers of this blog will know, I support the idea of nothing about us without us in terms of research on fat. I'm not holding my breath that academics are finally down with the radical notion that fat people are the ones who should be at the heart of knowledge production about fat, but you take your thrills where you can get them.
I may be excited about this because I've just downloaded another collective noun of dreary, unoriginal research articles by another thin career academic who has started to write Fat Studies-ish things about fat, sorry, 'the obese' without any apparent connection to, or knowledge of, fat people or fat community, and is doing very well out of it. There's a whole literature like this and it's growing like The Blob. I know this is part of generating a critical mass to help tip the discourse into less punitive terrain, and I know I'm supposed to be grateful for the attention, but I want more than crumbs like this.
Anyway, here are the calls:
Food, class and climate change bookI am writing a book about food, class and climate change, including a chapter on how arguments about fat people’s overconsumption end up with, as the BBC put it ‘Obese blamed for world’s ills.’ I want to include plenty of voices from people who have been opposing this discourse in whatever way, so I am looking for people to interview about their experiences of stigmatisation and fat activism. The interviews can be by email, by Skype or (geography permitting) in person, according to preference. If you think you might be interested, drop me a line at elaine@redpuffin.co.uk
Fat as disease journal articles
We currently have a call open for stories on Obesity. This narrative symposium was inspired by the American Medical Association decision to call obesity a disease. More details: http://www.nibjournal.org/authors/documents/Obesity_Call-final.pdf. Susan DuBois, Managing Editor of Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics
