CityFood NYC: Street Vendor Conference
Event Information
Description
“CityFood, NYC” is about how street foods feed a city -- socially, culturally, and politically. This afternoon of events will engage with current issues, imagining how future research and developing technologies could be harnessed to increase the beneficial impact of street vendors on the city and vice versa.
“CityFood, NYC” celebrates the diversity of street food across New York City by bringing the street foods themselves into the conference space through four sessions:
3:00 - 4:00 -- Keynote address by Alfonso Morales, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Wisconsin
4:00 - 5:00 -- Screening of documentary films by Sarah K Khan (sarahkkhan.com)
5:00 - 6:00 -- Panel I, “Street Food and Media: Representations of Street Foods and Street Vendors,” is a discussion of the role of media and ethnography in understanding street food and food vendors, with Jack Tchen, Sarah Khan, and Dave Cook.
6:00 - 7:00 -- Panel II, “A Right to the City: How Public Policy Shapes the Lives and Livelihoods of Street Food Vendors,” is a discussion focused on the current political challenges facing street vendor communities and immigrant street vendors in NYC, with Barbara Turk, Sean Basinski, Joseph Heathcott, and Heather Lee
The “CityFood, NYC” is the result of a collaborative effort between the NYU Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at Steinhardt and the Institute for Public Knowledge.
Refreshments and street foods will be served!
This event is free and open to the public. You will have to show a valid photo ID to enter the building at 20 Cooper Sq. (e.g. NYC ID, driver's license, student ID, etc.)
Contact CityFoodSymposium@nyu.edu with any questions or comments.
Organizer CityFood Symposium at NYU
Organizer of CityFood NYC: Street Vendor Conference
CityFood Symposium is an event that investigates the political and cultural history of street vendors.
As scholars have developed a rich repertoire of research on immigrant street vendors in global cities, food peddlers in newly industrialized countries, and hawkers in nineteenth-century Europe, it has brought us to a threshold of productive conceptualization, with its attendant challenges of communication between scholars, practitioners and policymakers. The current state of knowledge provides opportunities to launch cross-national and cross-temporal comparisons, develop conceptualization, appraise methods, investigate data collection processes across disciplines, and recommend best practices. Focused comparison will strengthen our understanding of how global and local forces are shaping the political, economic, social, and spatial elements of street food vending. This interdisciplinary work aims to reinforce the relationship between cities and street vendors, and ensures that such mobile entrepreneurs continue to thrive as vital components of our urban economies, by interrogating the historical and contemporary relationship between the legal environment, livelihoods of mobile people, and the liveliness of cities.
