Professor Claude Fischler will join Flinders from 13 February to 4 March as a Visiting International Research Fellow.

Next Friday (17 February) at Flinders’ Health Sciences Building  he will lead a seminar titled Eating is Social: The Power of Meals.

Professor Fischler is a French social scientist (sociology, anthropology), Senior Investigator with CNRS (the French National Science Center), and a former director of the Interdisciplinary Institute for Contemporary Anthropology in Paris.

From 2002 to 2014 he was Director of the Edgar Moran Centre, a graduate teaching and research division of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and of the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris.

Professor Fischler began exploring food and eating, then a relatively new topic for the social sciences, in the 1970s and developed cross-disciplinary approaches to food cultures and their evolution, to eating behaviour, to medical and lay perceptions of the relationship of food and health and to the perception of risk.

His recent interests have focused on ‘commensality’ – eating together – its forms and functions, its role in culture and society, its politics, as well as its possible impact on public health. The anthropology of commensality ties into the general issue of sharing food, at the local and global levels.

Over the past 40 years, Professor Fischler’s research and publications have informed and encouraged an international interest in food, especially the social and cultural significance of food patterns and eating practices. In recognition of his research leadership, he was invited to be a Panellist for the Nobel (Prize) Dialogue, Stockholm, in December, 2016.

His seminar will begin at 12pm in Lecture Theatre 1.09, Health Sciences Building.