Congratulations go to Merin Oleschuk whose paper, Foodies of Colour: Authenticity and Exoticism in Omnivorous Food Culture” published in Cultural Sociology recently received the Canadian Association for Food Studies' Student Paper Award. The CAFS established the Student Paper award in 2011 to recognize scholarly excellence and encourage participation by undergraduate and graduate students. The award is offered annually and includes a $200 prize, a one-year CAFS membership, complimentary conference registration, and a banquet ticket for the CAFS conference.
Merin is currently finishing her PhD program in Sociology at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Professor Josee Johnston. Her dissertation is called “Health and Cooking in Value and Practice: A Mixed Methods Study of Food in Family Life.” In it, she asks how and why people cook what they do at home, looking at both the values related to health and the different meanings of cooking as related to gender, class, and race/ethnicity.
Merin began the winning article as a course paper in the Research Practicum course that all PhD sociology take in their second year of study. Read more about the paper and Merin's process in writing it here.