Senior researcher - Meertens-KNAW - Amsterdam

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Job description
The Meertens Institute seeks an experienced mid-career researcher who will engage herself or himself in research at the crossroads of embodiment, senses, health and food culture. She or he will be endowed with the special task to establish and lead a research group dedicated to the theme of body, food and well-being, as part of the ethnological research within the institute. The theme connects to various initiatives within the KNAW Humanities Cluster on history, culture, and digital humanities, calling for interdisciplinary collaboration with an open, inclusive attitude.

Food and food cultures are dominant themes in present-day society. Whether understood from the perspective of health and well-being, environment, tradition, social class, nutrition, entertainment, or pleasure, food and food culture have proven to be fertile domains for research. Within these domains topics ranging as wide as aesthetics, the senses, morality, sports, lifestyle, illness and healing, aging, religion, diversity, ethnicity and identity are addressed. Insights in present-day perceptions of food, food practices (cooking, consumption, industries, waste) and food ideologies are pivotal for a better understanding of wider societal concerns related to the body, body politics and embodiment (unhealthy or healthy bodies; right or wrong bodies, gendered bodies, racialized bodies).

Importantly, these concerns about well-being, body and food need to be seen within a wider, global context. At the same time, locally situated ethnographic research is necessary to flesh out the structures, cultural forms and dynamics that give shape to a diversity of food and food cultures, and to see how these impinge on and give shape to body politics (traditions, conventions, contestations, tensions, paradoxes) in present societies such as the Dutch society.

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