Christina Ceisel | California State University, Fullerton (original) (raw)
Papers by Christina Ceisel
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, 2018
Understanding the procurement, preparation, and consumption of food as a form of communication, c... more Understanding the procurement, preparation, and consumption of food as a form of communication, critical/cultural scholars approach food and food related activities as texts, asking questions about power, identity, political economy, and culture. The emergent field of critical food studies represents a growing interdisciplinary interest in taking food seriously. Approaching cultural practices as the site of resistance to and incorporation into hegemonic social structures, cultural studies orients us towards questions regarding the politics of food practices with an eye towards social justice. Framed by an awareness of the performativity of cultural practices, both food studies and critical cultural studies engage questions of subjectivity, symbolic meaning, institutional power, identity, and consumption.
International Review of Qualitative Research , 2015
This essay offers a rumination on the many routes that offer to solve the unfinished business of ... more This essay offers a rumination on the many routes that offer to solve the unfinished business of modernity, unfinished business marked by the experience of nostalgia, the complex emotional mélange of longing, desire, and history. I use autoethnography to untangle the webs of signification around my relationship to Europe in general, and Spain in particular, as a site of personal ''heritage,'' linking its role in my performance of self with the production of otherness that is necessary to construct a self. I incorporate my memories of the Audrey Hepburn film Sabrina, which, along with many other classic Hollywood films and literature, provided an imaginative resource for a romanticized vision of Europe. This is complicated by a dia-sporic Cuban identity that circulates ideas of longing and home along the routes of Hispanidad-the cultural and migratory navigation between the spaces of Latin America, the United States, and the Iberian Peninsula.
Wine and Culture: From the Vineyard to the Glass (Rachel Black and Robert Ulin, Eds.) , 2013
Communication Theory , 2011
The landscape of Latin American celebrity representation, typically understood through the theore... more The landscape of Latin American celebrity representation, typically understood through the theoretical lens of cross-over, is undergoing significant shifts. The Colombian rockero Juanes's career, press reception, and participation in the transnational public sphere have established him as a celebrity diplomat. Read against the star texts of previous cross-overs, Juanes's economic success and the international attention his political efforts have garnered suggest a dynamic shift in the agency and representational strategies available to Latin American celebrities. His ability to succeed in this realm is contingent on a performance of hegemonic heterosexual masculinity. A critical discourse analysis and transnational feminist approach traces the production, circulation, and discourse of the music, press reception, and production of Juanes's celebrity and philantrophic/political efforts.
Understanding the procurement, preparation, and consumption of food as a form of communication, c... more Understanding the procurement, preparation, and consumption of food as a form of communication, critical/cultural scholars approach food and food related activities as texts, asking questions about power, identity, political economy, and culture. The emergent field of critical food studies represents a growing interdisciplinary interest in taking food seriously. Approaching cultural practices as the site of resistance to and incorporation into hegemonic social structures, cultural studies orients us towards questions regarding the politics of food practices with an eye towards social justice. Framed by an awareness of the performativity of cultural practices, both food studies and critical cultural studies engage questions of subjectivity, symbolic meaning, institutional power, identity, and consumption. Broadly speaking, critical cultural studies scholars examine foodways—the cultural, social, and economic aspects of the production and consumption of food—as (a) symbolic repertoires for the production of social identity; (b) a site of cultural performance; and (c) a metaphor for race, class, gender, and sexuality within popular culture. These areas overlap, reinforce, and problematize each other, and are not intended to provide an exhaustive account of the approaches critical cultural scholars take when integrating food studies into their research. As symbolic repertoires, food, foodways, and cuisine are often understood as integral to articulating identity around nationhood, race and ethnicity, class, and gender. Food, foodways, and cuisine provide potent examples of how symbols construct knowledge and meaning. As a site of cultural performance, foodways are understood as part of a cultural system embedded within a matrix of rituals, values, and practices that comprise the rhythm of daily life. Paying attention to food as performance reveals the intricacies of our understandings of and negotiations between self and community; nostalgia and the present moment; home and away; family and individual. Finally, cultural studies deconstructs the metonymic functions of food as presented in media texts. Methodologically, this research provides a textual analysis of how particular foodstuffs function rhetorically within media texts. Theoretically, it provides an important addition to our understanding of the workings of hegemony within the context of food as a metaphor for race, ethnicity, and gender, particularly on cable networks, reality TV, and in film.
Qualitative Inquiry, 2018
Why have autoethnographic responses to the political? Autoethnography is especially suited for th... more Why have autoethnographic responses to the political? Autoethnography is especially suited for thinking about the political because it’s positioned beyond the political. However, this isn’t because autoethnography belongs to the personal. To be sure, the personal is part of autoethnography, but it doesn’t comprise the totality of autoethnography. Autoethnography is equally a writing of the auto and the ethnos, a writing of the self and the multitude, both in the context of each other. In other words, autoethnography explores a particular type of being-with. The particular type of being-with that autoethnography explores is that of an intimacy. Autoethnography explores how the self relates to the multitude in an intimate way. This pertains to how one interacts with the other as a mattering human being.
Books by Christina Ceisel
https://www.amazon.com/Globalized-Nostalgia-Qualitative-Inquiry-Justice/dp/1138593532 In Globali... more https://www.amazon.com/Globalized-Nostalgia-Qualitative-Inquiry-Justice/dp/1138593532
In Globalized Nostalgia, Christina Ceisel shows how national identity is being remade for the global marketplace. Through media, cultural events, foodways, and personal narratives, we see how notions of the past are mobilized towards varied political, economic, and cultural ends.
In Galicia, Spain, Ceisel points towards tourism as one mode of cosmopolitan engagement, revisiting food festivals, wine tours, fishing excursions and reality television shows. She identifies globalized nostalgia as a feeling deeply connected to national identity – that these ‘performances’ of tourist activity rely on claims to an authentic past based on "heritage" for value to the consumer. While such strategies work to brand the nation, Ceisel demonstrates how they may also be employed towards emancipation and an inclusive participatory democracy.
Placing her own lived experience within the context of our historical present, relying on interpretive methods, including performance autoethnography, Ceisel highlights the tensions embedded in contemporary transnational cultural politics. Through the development of innovative methodological tools, Ceisel points towards new ways of thinking about the politics of belonging. Ultimately, Ceisel argues that we need to reorient our understandings of authenticity and heritage to accommodate the realities of hybridity and diaspora.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, 2018
Understanding the procurement, preparation, and consumption of food as a form of communication, c... more Understanding the procurement, preparation, and consumption of food as a form of communication, critical/cultural scholars approach food and food related activities as texts, asking questions about power, identity, political economy, and culture. The emergent field of critical food studies represents a growing interdisciplinary interest in taking food seriously. Approaching cultural practices as the site of resistance to and incorporation into hegemonic social structures, cultural studies orients us towards questions regarding the politics of food practices with an eye towards social justice. Framed by an awareness of the performativity of cultural practices, both food studies and critical cultural studies engage questions of subjectivity, symbolic meaning, institutional power, identity, and consumption.
International Review of Qualitative Research , 2015
This essay offers a rumination on the many routes that offer to solve the unfinished business of ... more This essay offers a rumination on the many routes that offer to solve the unfinished business of modernity, unfinished business marked by the experience of nostalgia, the complex emotional mélange of longing, desire, and history. I use autoethnography to untangle the webs of signification around my relationship to Europe in general, and Spain in particular, as a site of personal ''heritage,'' linking its role in my performance of self with the production of otherness that is necessary to construct a self. I incorporate my memories of the Audrey Hepburn film Sabrina, which, along with many other classic Hollywood films and literature, provided an imaginative resource for a romanticized vision of Europe. This is complicated by a dia-sporic Cuban identity that circulates ideas of longing and home along the routes of Hispanidad-the cultural and migratory navigation between the spaces of Latin America, the United States, and the Iberian Peninsula.
Wine and Culture: From the Vineyard to the Glass (Rachel Black and Robert Ulin, Eds.) , 2013
Communication Theory , 2011
The landscape of Latin American celebrity representation, typically understood through the theore... more The landscape of Latin American celebrity representation, typically understood through the theoretical lens of cross-over, is undergoing significant shifts. The Colombian rockero Juanes's career, press reception, and participation in the transnational public sphere have established him as a celebrity diplomat. Read against the star texts of previous cross-overs, Juanes's economic success and the international attention his political efforts have garnered suggest a dynamic shift in the agency and representational strategies available to Latin American celebrities. His ability to succeed in this realm is contingent on a performance of hegemonic heterosexual masculinity. A critical discourse analysis and transnational feminist approach traces the production, circulation, and discourse of the music, press reception, and production of Juanes's celebrity and philantrophic/political efforts.
Understanding the procurement, preparation, and consumption of food as a form of communication, c... more Understanding the procurement, preparation, and consumption of food as a form of communication, critical/cultural scholars approach food and food related activities as texts, asking questions about power, identity, political economy, and culture. The emergent field of critical food studies represents a growing interdisciplinary interest in taking food seriously. Approaching cultural practices as the site of resistance to and incorporation into hegemonic social structures, cultural studies orients us towards questions regarding the politics of food practices with an eye towards social justice. Framed by an awareness of the performativity of cultural practices, both food studies and critical cultural studies engage questions of subjectivity, symbolic meaning, institutional power, identity, and consumption. Broadly speaking, critical cultural studies scholars examine foodways—the cultural, social, and economic aspects of the production and consumption of food—as (a) symbolic repertoires for the production of social identity; (b) a site of cultural performance; and (c) a metaphor for race, class, gender, and sexuality within popular culture. These areas overlap, reinforce, and problematize each other, and are not intended to provide an exhaustive account of the approaches critical cultural scholars take when integrating food studies into their research. As symbolic repertoires, food, foodways, and cuisine are often understood as integral to articulating identity around nationhood, race and ethnicity, class, and gender. Food, foodways, and cuisine provide potent examples of how symbols construct knowledge and meaning. As a site of cultural performance, foodways are understood as part of a cultural system embedded within a matrix of rituals, values, and practices that comprise the rhythm of daily life. Paying attention to food as performance reveals the intricacies of our understandings of and negotiations between self and community; nostalgia and the present moment; home and away; family and individual. Finally, cultural studies deconstructs the metonymic functions of food as presented in media texts. Methodologically, this research provides a textual analysis of how particular foodstuffs function rhetorically within media texts. Theoretically, it provides an important addition to our understanding of the workings of hegemony within the context of food as a metaphor for race, ethnicity, and gender, particularly on cable networks, reality TV, and in film.
Qualitative Inquiry, 2018
Why have autoethnographic responses to the political? Autoethnography is especially suited for th... more Why have autoethnographic responses to the political? Autoethnography is especially suited for thinking about the political because it’s positioned beyond the political. However, this isn’t because autoethnography belongs to the personal. To be sure, the personal is part of autoethnography, but it doesn’t comprise the totality of autoethnography. Autoethnography is equally a writing of the auto and the ethnos, a writing of the self and the multitude, both in the context of each other. In other words, autoethnography explores a particular type of being-with. The particular type of being-with that autoethnography explores is that of an intimacy. Autoethnography explores how the self relates to the multitude in an intimate way. This pertains to how one interacts with the other as a mattering human being.
https://www.amazon.com/Globalized-Nostalgia-Qualitative-Inquiry-Justice/dp/1138593532 In Globali... more https://www.amazon.com/Globalized-Nostalgia-Qualitative-Inquiry-Justice/dp/1138593532
In Globalized Nostalgia, Christina Ceisel shows how national identity is being remade for the global marketplace. Through media, cultural events, foodways, and personal narratives, we see how notions of the past are mobilized towards varied political, economic, and cultural ends.
In Galicia, Spain, Ceisel points towards tourism as one mode of cosmopolitan engagement, revisiting food festivals, wine tours, fishing excursions and reality television shows. She identifies globalized nostalgia as a feeling deeply connected to national identity – that these ‘performances’ of tourist activity rely on claims to an authentic past based on "heritage" for value to the consumer. While such strategies work to brand the nation, Ceisel demonstrates how they may also be employed towards emancipation and an inclusive participatory democracy.
Placing her own lived experience within the context of our historical present, relying on interpretive methods, including performance autoethnography, Ceisel highlights the tensions embedded in contemporary transnational cultural politics. Through the development of innovative methodological tools, Ceisel points towards new ways of thinking about the politics of belonging. Ultimately, Ceisel argues that we need to reorient our understandings of authenticity and heritage to accommodate the realities of hybridity and diaspora.