Urban Food Festivals and Hospitable Cities

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Joanne Hollows, Steve Jones and Ben Taylor's research on urban food festivals has recently been published in the Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events.

The article examines urban food festivals, and in doing so it carries out a case study of Nottingham’s food and drink festival (NFDF). It contends that such festivals need to be understood in relation to local contexts, such as the reputation for alcohol-related disorder associated with Nottingham’s night-time economy. Rather than being used to attract tourism, NFDF was primarily directed at existing residents of Nottingham, where it sought to produce particular kinds of guests who would be able to invest in the city’s wider regeneration. Here, the article draws on recent academic work on hospitality in demonstrating how NFDF attempted to rebrand the city centre as a more hospitable place. It concludes by showing how visitors to NFDF exhibited a sense of generosity and pride, and argues that the meaning of urban food festivals cannot, therefore, simply be reduced to the logic of neoliberal governance. 

Joanne Hollows, Steve Jones and Ben Taylor with Kimberley Dowthwaite, 'Making Sense of Urban Food Festivals: cultural regeneration, disorder and hospitable cities', Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events, 2013.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19407963.2013.774406  

The Politics of the Campaigning Culinary Documentary

At the end of last year, Joanne Hollows gave a paper on ‘The Politics of the Campaigning Culinary Documentary’ at the International Symposium on Media, Food and Identity at the University of Copenhagen (13-14 November 2012).

Joanne identified campaigning culinary documentaries as structured around a problem-solving narrative in which television personalities and celebrities drawn from the world of food media seek to utilize their status to affect some kind of social, economic or cultural change. While drawing on conventions from lifestyle programming and documentary formats, they frequently also draw heavily on conventions from reality TV. This sub-genre not only relies on the ‘makeover’ format in its use of ‘ordinary people’ whose habits must be transformed but represents the food personality or celebrity as an ‘inspirational’ figure who is potentially capable of effecting a much wider-scale makeover of institutions, industries or practices.  Many of these conventions were first utilized effectively in Jamie’s School Dinners (2005) and, in the UK, the format has remained closely associated with Channel 4 in series such as Jamie’s Ministry of Food (2008), Hugh’s Chicken Run (2008), The People’s Supermarket (2011) and Jimmy and the Giant Supermarket (2012).

In this paper, Joanne focused on these examples to explore how they represent the relationships between the classed and gendered identities of both the ‘inspirational’ food personalities at the centre of these series who act as campaigning moral entrepreneurs and the ‘ordinary people’ whose habits must be made-over or transformed if social change is to occur. She examined how these identities are associated with different ethical dispositions, both in Bourdieu’s theoretical sense of the term and in relation to more commonsense understandings of ‘ethical consumption’.  However, Joanne also suggested that these series work to individualize social and economic problems and also work to associate political responsibility with charismatic individuals rather than government responsibility. This is located within a broader context of the current political climate in the UK.

Feminism and the Politics of Consumption

In her recent article in Feminist Media Studies, Joanne Hollows examines the significance of representations of both consumer culture and consumption practices in the British feminist magazine Spare Rib during its initial years of publication from 1972 to 1974. 

Her analysis identifies how the magazine combined an established feminist critique of consumer culture with guidance on responsible consumption practices. The dispositions towards consumption that are recommended to readers are shaped by four key values: these are health, the natural, economy and craft production. These values underpin a politics of consumption during a period in which Spare Rib attempted to negotiate a feminist identity. However, once this feminist identity was established, content centred around consumption rapidly diminished as it was apparently not “feminist” enough. The article questions how a “conventional” position was established against both consumer culture and consumption practices within second-wave feminism and raises questions about the impact of this position on feminism’s relationship to both consumer culture and consumption practices today. 

Joanne Hollows (2012), 'Spare Rib, Second-wave Feminism and the Politics of Consumption', Feminist Media Studies, DOI:10.1080/14680777.2012.708508