Dr. Ryan King-White, a 2008 PhD graduate in Kinesiology and current professor at Towson University, will be presenting his current food research. His presentation is titled: "Feeding the Fat Fight through Free-Market Capitalism: An Ethnography of a Food Production Store"
"It's based on an ethnography at a 'healthy' meal production store that discusses how its practices perpetuate and are perpetuated by the constraints of the market," he says.
The Healthy Turtle sat down with Joy Bauer to learn more about the conference.
HT: How is the research presented?
JB: In our area (Physical Cultural Studies), most of the presentations seen at national or international conferences are based on papers and are read during a session that has three to four presenters. Some choose to read the papers, some choose to present the work in a less structured way, but the presenters usually have 15 minutes to present their work, and then there is time for questions at the end of the session.
HT: What if we want to present, but we are not comfortable with this presentation style?
JB: This is a very different format than most of our colleagues in SPH, and the other areas of KNES, so we added a poster session with the hopes of appealing to a wider audience in SPH. For the poster session, it will be similar to Research Interaction Day. The majority of the presentations already accepted look to be in the traditional format of a humanities conference, but for the poster session, we don't expect a formal presentation - just a short period of time where the students will be by their poster to answer any questions.
HT: Do the abstract submitters need a poster? Do they need anything else?
JB: Nope! While the poster session is one of the options, a presenter can basically show up and spend 15 minutes talking about their research in any format. Presenters can read papers, show PowerPoints, have a photo show, be in conversation with the audience, etc. Last year we even had a presenter from the Dance department show part of her thesis performance and then discuss the elements that went into the work as it related to the bodies of the dancers.
HT: Why do you think it is important to have this be an interdisciplinary conference? In other words, why is a holistic approach to this topic relevant?
JB: It's important for us to have an interdisciplinary conference because we noticed that, given the different formats that our research is presented in, I believe the grad students in KNES and in the SPH tend to only see works that are in their area, or in the format their area usually utilizes. For example, our research in PCS does not usually lend itself to the poster format at Research Interaction Day, and GRID sponsored by SPH and the university, so there are few chances for our colleagues outside of PCS to see "what we do," and vice versa. Additionally, in Kinesiology and in Public Health, we believe that the topic of health and bodies must be examined from multiple perspectives in order to get anything accomplished. Thus, qualitative and quantitative work on health and bodies must be considered, as well as the biological, sociological, cultural, psychological, biomechanical, psychological, historical, etc. perspectives on health and bodies. That is our goal with widening the scope of the conference: to engage these multiple viewpoints and perspectives together in conversation at one event.
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