Theorizing commensality discourses: food truck communication and influence in local culture
Date
2022
Authors
Combs, Mitch, author
Aoki, Eric, advisor
Khrebtan-Hörhager, Julia, committee member
Elkins, Evan, committee member
Carolan, Michael, committee member
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Abstract
Food trucks offer spaces of commensality where people negotiate cultural identity and senses of place though practices, tastes, and performances communicated through enactments of food sharing. In this dissertation, I theorize commensality as a rhetorical texture of subcultural ideology, a rhetorical texture of resistance to cultural gentrification, and as a digital process of online community building. I use rhetorical criticism and ethnographic methods of participant observation to analyze physical spaces of food truck commensality in Fort Collins, Colorado: The FOCO Food Truck Rally and North College Avenue. Additionally, I conduct a media discourse analysis of the Fort Collins food truck Instagram community. Overall, I argue that commensality operates as a subcultural ideology resistant and reifying of gourmet elitism, a rhetoric of difference resistant to cultural gentrification, and a process digital commensality building community through social mediated branding, networking, and audiencing.
Description
Rights Access
Subject
ethnography
global
rhetoric
food studies
commensality
local