It is time for the annual call for abstracts from the best food studies conference in North America. This year it will be hosted at Occidental College, in sunny southern California. The call for abstracts and details, from the conference sponsors, follows:
Occidental College is pleased to host the Joint 2017 Annual Meetings and Conference of the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society (AFHVS) and the Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS).
The conference theme, “Migrating Food Cultures: Engaging Pacific Perspectives on Food and Agriculture,” invites us to reflect on and engage with the entirety of the Pacific region. The conference setting of Los Angeles, California, is a dynamic, diverse, and multiethnic global city that serves as a gateway, destination, and waypoint. Much of the food itself in California is produced in part by migrating workers and immigrants; indeed, the food scene in Los Angeles is the result of migrating food cultures. We use our conference’s location to invite participants to imagine and explore how the agricultural and food worlds throughout the Pacific mesh with environmental, social, cultural, historical, and material resources. We likewise invite participants to examine the roles of people, place, innovation, food production, and consumption, with attention to how these roles reflect and reinforce the social, economic, and cultural food landscapes of the Pacific.
Submissions
AFHVS and ASFS support scholarship and public presentation on a wide variety of topics at their conferences. For this year’s conference, in keeping with the theme, we encourage but do not require that papers, panel sessions, roundtables, and workshops speak to the theme. These sessions can be from practitioners, activists, and others working in food systems and culture. Submission areas include but are not limited to:
- Food systems: local and global, past and present
- Culture and cultural studies
- Discipline-specific and interdisciplinary research
- Art, design, and technology
- Ethics and philosophy
- Food access, security, and sovereignty
- Migration, immigration, diaspora and transnational community studies
- Community studies
- Cultural, agricultural, and culinary preservation and innovation
- Governance, policy, and rights
- Pedagogy, food education, and/or experiential education
- Labor in the food system, production, consumption
- Energy and agriculture
- Health: problems, paradigms, and professions
Submission Procedure
Submission system opens: December 15, 2016
Abstracts due: January 31, 2017
All proposals must include:
- type of submission (e.g., individual paper, panel, roundtable, lightning talk, exploration gallery, etc.);
- title of paper, panel, or event;
- submitter’s name, organizational affiliation, and status (e.g., undergraduate, graduate student, postdoc, faculty, independent scholar, community)
- submitter’s email address;
- names, email addresses, and organizational affiliations of co-authors or co-organizers;
- abstract of 250 or fewer words that describes the proposed paper, panel, or event;
- indication of any special AV/technology needs;
- a list of up to six descriptive keywords/phrases for the program committee to use in organizing sessions and events;
- any attachments must include the last name of the submitter (i.e., LANGpanel.doc).
For individual papers: Papers will be grouped with similarly themed topics to the best of the program organizer’s abilities. Please submit a single abstract along with contact information.
For panels: Panels are pre-organized groups of no more than 4 papers, with a chair and discussant (who may be one person). Please include a panel abstract as well as abstracts for each individual paper. Conference organizers will make the utmost effort to preserve panels but reserve the right to move papers with consultation from panel organizer.
For roundtables: Roundtables are less formal discussion forums where participants speak for a short time before engaging with audience members. Please submit a single abstract along with a list of expected participants.
For lightning talks: Lightning talks are a short talk format. Each talk will last a maximum of 5 minutes and will be included in a session with other lightning talks. The goal is to quickly, insightfully, and clearly convey your point while grabbing the audience’s attention.
For workshops: Workshops are experiential or focused sessions where participants pre-register. Please provide an abstract as well as a list of organizers, resource and space needs, and any expected costs. We, unfortunately, do not have kitchen space for participants.
For exploration gallery display and poster proposals: Graduate students, food scholars, NGOs, researchers outside the academy, artists, and other members of the community are welcome to propose works for the 2017 Exploration Gallery. All media are welcome, including installations, print and other visual forms, audio, posters, and other works of art and design. A limited number of screen-based submissions will be accepted.
Notifications of acceptance will be provided by Wednesday, March 15, 2017. Attendees are expected to register by Sunday, April 30, 2017. For inclusion on the final program, at least one author from each submission must be registered as an attendee. Attendees must be members of AFHVS or ASFS at the time of the conference. The conference organizers regret that we are unable to provide travel support for meeting participation. Multiple submissions from an author are allowed, though we reserve the right to limit acceptance of multiple submissions by any one author. Space for workshops is limited and will be determined based on available resources.
Please direct questions to foodstudies@oxy.edu
