Association conferences

This year’s conference aims to dig deep, using food as a starting point for reckoning, reimagining, and reconciliation. As food scholars, we know that food systems are both productive of and resistant to social, political, and environmental injustice. They are sites of exploitation and innovation, mental and physical wellness and illness, security and resilience, isolation and conviviality. We also need to recognize that food studies itself embeds methods, ideologies, hegemonies, and knowledge distribution structures that contribute to these many benefits and imbalances.
For 2023, we are particularly interested in content that proposes new alternatives for imagining what food is and what food studies can be. How can our cross-disciplinary, cross-community, and cross-sector subject become an opportunity for radically re-making the ways we examine, understand, and talk about food? What alternative ontologies and epistemologies can be deployed? What assumptions and habits can be challenged? What new forms of wondering, care, and empathy can be established? We welcome participants to explore the tensions between urgent, current issues and the longer-term structural change needed in academia and governance. How can we imagine a future of food studies in which expertise, extractivism, and ego have been replaced with relationality, exchange, and humility?