[Anthropgrad] RSH– Work-in-Progress Seminar – Donna Lee Brien.

[Jodi Parvey]

The Research School of Humanities presents,

A WORK-IN-PROGRESS SEMINAR – please note this is 
being held on a different day for this week only.
1- 2.30 pm, Tuesday 5 August 2008, Theatrette, Old Canberra House.

Enabling new ways of thinking about the world?: 
The Australian food writer as activist
Associate Professor Donna Lee Brien
Associate Professor of Creative Industries, and 
Head, School of Arts and Creative Enterprise, Central Queensland University.

Food writing makes up a significant proportion of 
the books, articles, weblogs and other texts 
written, published, sold and read each year in 
Australia. While the food writing in cookbooks, 
magazines and other publications is often thought 
of as providing useful, but banal, practical 
skill-based information, recent scholarship has 
begun to suggest that food writing is a more 
creative, and interesting, form of cultural 
production. As part of a biographically-based 
study of Australian food writers, this 
work-in-progress seminar focuses on the roles the 
contemporary food writer plays in an environment 
where food is the subject of considerable 
scholarly, policy and personal interest and 
anxiety. In such a context, a number of 
contemporary food writers engage with issues 
around food production and consumption. These 
issues include sustainable and ethical 
agriculture, biodiversity and genetic 
modification, food miles and fair trade, food 
safety and security, and obesity, diabetes and 
other health issues. In this activity, the 
Australian food writer is, moreover, not only a 
media commentator on these important contemporary 
concerns, but is, at times, a forward-thinking 
activist, advocating and campaigning for change.


Donna Lee Brien is the Associate Professor of 
Creative Industries, and Head, School of Arts and 
Creative Enterprise, Central Queensland 
University.  She is the author of John Power 
1881-1943 and co-author of the popular self-help 
books Girl’s Guide to Real Estate: How to Enjoy 
Investing in Property and Girl’s Guide to Work 
and Life: How to Create the Life you Want.  Donna 
is widely published in the academic areas of 
writing pedagogy and praxis, and collaborative 
practice in the arts. She is the founding 
co-editor of dotlit: The Online Journal of 
Creative Writing and Assistant Editor of Imago: 
New Writing and Imago: Online. Donna is currently 
an Associate Editor of New Writing: the 
International Journal for the Practice and Theory 
of Creative Writing (UK), and is on the Board of 
Readers for Writing Macao.  She is the President 
of the Australian Association of Writing Programs 
and in 2006 was has awarded a Carrick Institute 
Citation for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning.
Convenors
Stephen Foster and Ken Taylor
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