Antara Dey has won the Mahmoud Eid Graduate Prize at the Canadian Communication Association (CCA) Annual Conference 2026, held at the University of Windsor, Ontario.
The Mahmoud Eid Graduate Prize is presented to the best graduate-level (Master鈥檚 or PhD) student paper submitted to the Canadian Communication Association (CCA) annual conference that focuses on media and diversity in Canada, as it pertains to race, religion, and/or Indigeneity.
Dey received the award for her paper, 鈥淐urry, Camera, and Communication: Tasting Home in the Bengali Diaspora.鈥
This paper explores how Bengali food mediates diaspora identity, emotion, and sense of belonging through the mediums of cinema and lived experience. Combining textual analysis and autoethnography, the study examines the films Maacher Jhol (2017) and Daab Chingri (2019) alongside the researcher鈥檚 act of sourcing ingredients and cooking these dishes while living in the Bengali diaspora in Canada. Through this dual lens, the paper analyzes how maacher jhol (fish curry) and daab chingri (prawns in coconut milk curry) serve as signifiers that bridge the distance between home and hostland through taste, texture, and memory.
Photo of Antara Dey receiving the Mahmoud Eid Graduate Prize at CCA 2026
The research builds on Banerji (2001), Barthes (1957/1972), and Murcott鈥檚 (1986) work on Bengali cuisine, food semiotics, and food identity. The personal accounts expand on the presenter鈥檚 experiences of moving away from home, childhood memories of Bengali food, and cooking in a Canadian city while illustrating her journey of cooking two Bengali dishes inspired by her two grandmothers. Bengali foodways, thus, emerge as a system for familial bonding to recreate a sense of home and communicative archive where taste and texture carry the taste of home and connection. Ultimately, the paper enables a discussion of food鈥檚 multiple meanings while commemorating its power as a narrator of identity, an emotion of nostalgia, and a sign of cultural expression.
Reflecting on the recognition, Dey shared:
鈥淢y grandmothers inspired this research long before I knew it would become an academic project. Through their recipes, I learned that food is memory, history, culture, and a language of love. This paper is both a scholarly exploration and a tribute to the women whose cooking helped me carry a sense of home across continents while living far from my family as part of the Canadian Bengali diaspora. Winning this prize highlights how some of our most powerful stories about identity, migration, and belonging are not only communicated through media, but also through taste, memory, and the recipes passed down across generations.鈥