The invitation

NB some of you who received blogger invitations may not have received this email invitation that explained why you had been invited to contribute to this blog.


Hi Everybody

I've recently been writing a series of Geographies of food reviews for a journal called Progress in human geography. One review was published in 2006 - 'following' - the next is out later this year - 'mixing' - and I'd like to co-author the third and final one - 'afters' - with as many of you as are interested.

The reason that you have ended up on this email list is for one or more of the following reasons:

- Your work is cited (briefly for most, in detail for some) in one or both reviews;
- Your work should have been cited (time and word counts were a big problem);
- You helped put these reviews together (discussing ideas, sending pdfs, reading & commenting on drafts);
- You read and responded to the first review when it was published;
- I thought you might be interested in getting involved in the final review;
[- new - someone else thought you might be interested in getting involved in the final review]

When I started reading for the first review paper, I got quite nervous about fully and fairly representing what was going on in this field. The more I read, the more I needed to read, disciplinary boundaries vanished, I should have known!

So, I thought it would be a good idea to allow those people whose work I (should have) roped in to the first two papers to, at least, have a right to reply, but also to get on paper what they (and/or their students) might say after reading these reviews (good and bad).

To get this dialogue going, and to produce the raw materials for the third review paper, I'd like to invite you to contribute to a blog set up for this purpose: http://food-afters.blogspot.com/ . You will be getting official invitations soon and these should make the blog fairly straightforward to use, even for those (like me until recently) unused to blogging. Please email me ASAP if there is a problem (e.g. you invitation doesn't arrive in the next 24 hours). There are likely to be teething problems - apologies in advance - and hope they don't put anyone off.

The third review will be manufactured out of this dialogue, with all contributors being credited a co-authors (not 'Ian Cook, with assistance from...' I promise). How this will be done will be part of the discussion. I do have some experience with this kind of process, but so do many of you...

I've set a deadline for contributions for the end of August, so that I/we can hopefully submit the paper in October.

Finally, I hope this seems like an interesting and worthwhile project to get involved in. I'm hoping that it will only be time-consuming for me. Let's see what happens. As an incentive, there's a free car for the first person to post! gone.

Please don't hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions, and to get copies of one or both of the papers (I'm not allowed to make them freely available).

Thanks and best wishes. I couldn't have got this far without you!



Ian