July 2021: Evoking Identity(ies) & Memories Through Food w/ Ashley M. Beardsley
In this workshop, we will capture food memories. Working from Meredith Abarca’s and Joshua Colby’s definition of food memory as “a sense that provides a polytemporal consciousness, that (re)defines home and longing for home, the root of one's identity, as an embodied experience, and that finds expression through various narrative forms: oral, written, digital, and performative,” we will explore how food constructs identity(ies) and is a form of collective memory, how food evokes nostalgia, and how food is embodied through all of our senses as we write about what we eat/don’t eat and why. Through guided prompts and activities, you’ll create and contribute several recipes to our workshop’s digital community cookbook. Your recipes might look like traditional recipes, poems, performance pieces, etc., but using whatever form your recipes take, you’ll work to (re)create the socialization that occurs when we share food with one another by exploring, documenting, and sharing images of your creative process, simultaneously constructing texts that embody individual and collective food memories.
Materials:
Pen, paper, a camera or a phone with a camera, any recipes you might want to use as a starting place and/or recipes you’re interested in exploring
Bio:
Ashley M. Beardsley bakes in order to understand herself, her relationship with others, her work, and to embody her writing process. She is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric and Writing Studies (University of Oklahoma) where she studies digital and community literacy, the rhetoric of food, and feminist rhetoric. She also works as the Assistant Director of Technical Writing and Communication, teaches technical writing, and is an assistant editor of Kairos, A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. She earned her MFA from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. When she’s not analyzing how people talk about food, she’s most likely in the kitchen, trying out new sourdough recipes.
Logistics:
- This workshop runs from July 1, 2021 - July 31, 2021.
- Workshops consist of one video per week for each week in the month. Videos are 45-60 minutes long, and are shared on a private YouTube account.
- Class discussions are held via Slack.
- All readings, creative prompts, and shared artwork will be exchanged via a private Google Drive folder.
- All workshops are designed for you. Dedicate as much or as little time to the workshop per week as you'd like.
- This workshop is taught in English, but collective.aporia offers subtitles for the workshop videos in over 60 languages. If you have questions about language accommodations, please feel free to email us at [email protected].
Donations:
Collective.aporia believes in paying working artists fairly for their time and work. As a diverse international collective, we also believe strongly in valuing fair exchange—whether that be monetary, energetic, or otherwise.
Because of these beliefs, our workshop donations all begin at a $40 base rate with the option to give additional donation amounts, if you’re able. Seventy percent of the donations go to facilitator, and the remainder goes back into collective.aporia for operational expenses.
Participants also have the option to donate money towards the community scholarship, which provides opportunities to folks from these communities to attend workshops at no cost.
Please check out this page to learn more and/or apply for the scholarship.
We understand that not everyone has the financial means to donate $40. In the spirit of collaboration and exchange, we have developed a work exchange initiative that allows folks to choose what kind of work they would like to trade for free entry into the workshop. Examples of this work include writing blog posts, creating and sharing social media content, editing video subtitles, etc.
Thank you for your generosity!
[Image credit: Ashley M. Beardsley]