[Deadline Extended to April 20] Food Futures: Humanities and Social Sciences Approaches [Deadline Extended!]
Food Futures: Humanities and Social Sciences Approaches
November 13-14, 2020
National Sun Yat-sen University Kaohsiung, Taiwan
In January 2019, the EAT-Lancet commission released a two-year study on “Food in the Anthropocene,” arguing that “civilization is in crisis,” and that the urgent need for both healthy diets and balanced planetary resources not come at the expense of accelerating trends which are unprecedented in human history (Lucas and Horton 2019). The global food regime is a matter of growing concern within the urgent horizons of climate change and biodiversity loss, among other critical planetary challenges. Building on a forthcoming special issue of the journal Humanities focused on these issues, the Humanities for the Environmental global network of Observatories (HfE) will convene an international conference in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, headquarters of the Asia-Pacific Observatory. The conference will ask questions about humans, food systems, and the futures of food, including but not limited to:
What role can or does culture (and the humanities, in collaboration with the social and natural sciences) play in transforming the relations between societal challenges and environmental crises where food is a central factor?
How can new/future food systems be developed that hold greater promise of sustainability than dominant local/global systems at present?
Can new consumption practices be enabled at scales that make a difference globally? If so, how?
How are humanists working in collaboration with community groups, indigenous groups, and business, to pilot public-facing projects focusing on increasing food security and sustainability?
This conference will examine the growing interconnections between food sovereignty, land and sea rights, legacies of colonization and slavery, dispossession, and food insecurities. We invite academics, writers, activists, independent scholars, and artists to submit their work.
Topics of individual papers or complete panel proposals may include, but are not limited to:
- food futures as depicted in literature and film (cli-fi, sci-fi, etc.)
- community-based projects focused on food futures
- food sovereignty / security / insecurity
- Indigenous knowledges/ foodways
- regenerative agriculture/ aquaculture
- gastronomies of place
- solidarity movements/ solidarity economies
- environmental histories focused on food production
- urban farming
- factory farming
- fisheries
- resource depletion
- meat production and consumption
- animal domestication
- cruelty to animals
- species extinction
- informal / community gardening
- veganism/plant-based diets
- permaculture
- agroforestry / foraging
- experimental / future food
- water use
- agricultural labor
- activism and advocacy
- diet and nutrition
- food and public health
- environmental impacts of food production and consumption
- climate change and/or biodiversity implications of food systems
Keywords
- Environmental Humanities
- Critical Food Studies
- Public Health
- Sustainability
Please send your abstract (250 words), along with a brief biographical note within 100 words by April 20, 2020 to 2020foodfutures@gmail.com. This conference welcomes both individual papers and panel proposals.