CALL FOR CHAPTER PROPOSALS

Eating for a Green Future

Literature, Culture, and the Politics of Food in Contemporary India

Edited by

Dr. Manisha Mohanty (Assistant Professor, S'O'A University & Fulbright-Nehru Fellow)

Dr. Shashibhusan Nayak (MLA Bibliography Fellow, MLA)

Dr. Sonali Das (Assistant Professor, S’O’A University)

This edited volume begins from a single premise: food cannot be discussed apart from the politics that surround it. Questions around production and consumption are inseparable from issues of hunger, malnutrition, social inequality, and ecological crisis. The concept of 'food culture', understood as the cooking and eating of food, must be reexamined in the light of sustainability and structural violence. Industrial agriculture, multinational food corporations, and extreme disparities in access have made eating an exercise of power as much as of nourishment. In India, the evidence is stark. Farmer suicides, shrinking biodiversity, corporate-controlled food systems, and climate-induced crop failures expose the systemic inequalities that run through the country’s foodways. The volume gathers essays on literature, film, digital media, and everyday food practice, investigating how contemporary texts address climate change, agribusiness, land dispossession, toxic labour, and food scarcity. One question threads through the whole collection: how much of what we eat still comes from traditional, community-based knowledge, and how much is determined by global agribusiness, whose interest lies in maximizing profit rather than social welfare or universal nourishment? This leads us to explore how corporate food systems blur the distinction between inherited culinary practices and their commodified imitations. The result is a food culture in which authenticity itself becomes a marketing strategy. This volume works across food studies, environmental humanities, and popular culture, and its ambition is both practical and critical: to propose justice-oriented frameworks for rethinking consumption, appetite, and sustainability.

Proposed Themes: 

• Food and sustainability: How can food culture foreground sustainability and ecological concerns rather than mere novelty or elitist pleasure?
• Culinary knowledge and agribusiness: How much of what we eat today emerges from traditional ecological knowledge, local seed cultures, and community foodways, and what is shaped by agribusiness, multinational food corporations, and algorithmically curated “choices”?
• Rethinking consumption: How can we rethink everyday modes of eating, cooking, and appetite to bring about positive ecological change and more equitable food systems?
• Power and intersectionality: How does the intersection of food studies and environmental studies illuminate caste, class, and racial hierarchies, gendered labour, and entrenched social inequalities?
• Food justice: How do literary texts, films, digital campaigns, and social media food cultures imagine or fail to imagine food justice, and how might these imaginaries inform public policy and activism?  

Proposed Structure : 

Part I: Food, Ecology, and Justice

• Food politics, food justice, and environmental humanities
• Traditional ecological knowledge and culinary/cultural memory
• Rethinking appetite and taste in times of climate crisis

Part II: Literature, Film, and Visual Culture

• Novels and memoirs centred on famine, scarcity, or ecological degradation
• Regional food literatures
• Films that foreground drought, crop failure, farmer suicides, or agrarian distress

Part III: Digital Foodscapes, Social Media, Influencers, and Algorithms

• Hashtag activism around hunger, food waste, land rights, and seed sovereignty
• Corporate influence in online food marketing
• Online recipe cultures as spaces of resistance (low-waste cooking, foraging, veganism, zero-waste influencers, etc.)

Part IV: Politics and the Future of Food

• Analysing policy texts, food security laws, and welfare schemes through a cultural lens
• Grassroots food sovereignty movements, community kitchens, seed banks
• Frameworks for sustainable and just food futures grounded in local knowledge systems
• Pedagogy: teaching food–environment issues in classrooms, community settings, and online spaces

Part V: Special Section India/Odisha

• Indigenous and Adivasi food knowledge
• Cyclone-prone ecologies and coastal food insecurity
• Temple food cultures
• Gendered kitchen labour in rural and urban India/Odisha
• Caste-based food taboos and community food practices
• Land, mining, and displacement affecting food systems

Submission Guidelines: 

We invite scholars, independent researchers, and practitioners working in literary and cultural studies, environmental humanities, food studies, media studies, and related fields to submit original, unpublished chapter proposals. Interdisciplinary and comparative approaches are especially encouraged.

Proposals should include:

• An abstract of 300–350 words outlining the chapter’s argument, methodology, and primary texts or case studies
• 5–6 keywords
• A short biographical note (75–100 words) with full name, institutional affiliation, and contact details

Full chapters should be:

• 5,000–8,000 words in length, inclusive of notes and references
• Follow MLA style (9th edition)
• Original, previously unpublished, and not under review elsewhere

Timeline: 

• Abstract submission deadline: 15 October 2026 
• Notification of acceptance: 20 November 2026 
• Full chapter submission: 28 February 2027

Submission: 

Please send abstracts and biographical notes as a single Word document to:

Dr. Shashibhusan Nayak: shashienglish@gmail.com

                                 and 

Dr. Manisha Mohanty: manishamohanty@soa.ac.in

Publication: 

Following the review of abstracts and full chapters, the completed manuscript will be submitted for consideration to Bloomsbury. All chapters will undergo peer review as part of the standard editorial and publisher review process.