5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

Through the act of eating, the world is experienced and narrated. The availability of energies configures in the bodies the horizons of action and ways of feeling. Taste and the other senses provide impressions of the social environment that structure perceptions and emotions appropriate and acceptable for each context. The bodily condition guides the ways of living, producing and reproducing life. Thus, the body/emotion duality shows the differential appropriation of the world and of structural inequalities.
The study of food and emotions allows us to observe the social structure that binds society together. Eating implies edible products, food, preparations, sharing food with others, a time-space, a history, an identity, cognitive-affective practices, and a network of social relations. The food event ties together sociabilities and emotions around the ways in which access to each plate of food is constituted. While in some social and geo-political sectors the modern eater consumes individually edible products all day and all the time, other sectors, beset by economic inequality and hunger, sustain daily life through the collective organization of eating. In this scenario, understanding the emotions linked to food contributes to the problematization of the social regulation of conflict in the 21st century. We encourage the submission of papers on how feeding, eating, and nourishing constitute emotional and social phenomena. Similarly, we welcome presentations about the collective organization of eating and various geocultural eating practices.