[acc-cca-l] CFP: PUBLIC 76: Roots/Routes: Imagining Future Foodways

[public]

[△EXTERNAL]


CALL FOR PROPOSALS
—
PUBLIC 76: ROOTS/ROUTES: Imagining Future Foodways
Edited by Amanda White and Katie Lawson
(Fall 2027)

The seventy-sixth issue of PUBLIC invites artists, curators, scholars, and activists working at the intersection of art and food to explore and give voice to the social, cultural, political, and environmental entanglements of food. Foodways are situated by roots that connect them to land and place, to agriculture and human culture; yet they are also planetary, tied to the long history of empires, trade, colonization, globalization, and migratory routes. Contemporary food systems are increasingly precarious: Agricultural land and the people who work them are overburdened and exploited, a fact that is intensified by the acceleration of climate change. The climate crisis is radically reshaping where and how food can be grown, placing increasing pressure on agricultural lands and water systems while disrupting established growing seasons and foodways. Extreme weather events, drought, flooding, and rising temperatures threaten crops and livestock, while the ecological impacts of changing food systems are unevenly distributed among those who grow, harvest, produce, and consume food. At the same time, efforts to adapt food systems to a changing climate raise questions about whose knowledge, technologies, and practices will shape the food systems of the future.

While food is recognized as a basic human right, access to it remains profoundly unequal, and the conditions contributing to global food insecurity continue to intensify. Conflict, displacement, poverty, and unequal access to land and resources all shape who can grow, gather, prepare, share, and consume food. Yet, food exceeds the question of biological sustenance. It is a medium through which cultures are maintained and transformed, carrying knowledge, histories, memories, and traditions across generations and borders. Food can express joy, community, care, and love, while also becoming a site of resistance, sovereignty, belonging, and political struggle. The ways we grow, gather, prepare, share, and consume food reveal complex relationships between people, land, labour, and more-than-human life.

“ROOTS/ROUTES: Imagining Future Foodways” invites contributions from individuals and collectives that consider these multiple and sometimes contradictory dimensions of food through creative and arts-based practices. How do foodways connect us to places while moving across borders and territories? What histories and power relations are carried through what we grow, gather, prepare, and consume? How might food offer ways of thinking about collective survival, reciprocity, and alternative futures? And, ultimately, what will nourish us into the future?

Though not exhaustive, a list of possible topics includes:

Sovereignty/Rights: Food sovereignty, Indigenous foodways, seeds, colonialism, agriculture and food as a form of political resistance, human rights and the right to food (food security, policy, conflict).

Culture/Movement: Food traditions and identity (cultural, familial, historical), diasporic foodways, global and local food systems, migration and displacement, recipes as intergenerational knowledge, food as a practice of care, queer and feminist perspectives.

Labour/Land: Agricultural labour and justice, sustainable and regenerative agriculture, land-based knowledge, soil exhaustion, geographies of food systems.

Climate/Futures: Technology and food, food waste and circular economies, extractive foodways (resource depletion, corporate supply chains), regenerative, alternative, and speculative food systems, the future of food.

+ Additional topics at the intersection of art and food

TYPES OF CONTRIBUTIONS

• Academic papers (~5,000 words max.)
• Narrative or personal essays (2,000 words max.)
• Conversations/Dialogues (~1,000 words)
• Recipes (1–5 recipes)
• Short texts, manifestos, calls for action (~1,000 words)
• Artist Projects (5 images max, with ~1,000 words text)
• Poetry and creative writing (1–5 poems, or 2,000 words max)

Deadline for proposals: December 1st, 2026 (by 11:59pm EST)

Interested authors and artists can find more details including submission requirements at: publicjournal.ca/submit<https://www.publicjournal.ca/submit/>

General inquiries can be sent to: public at yorku.ca<mailto:public at yorku.ca>


ABOUT THE ISSUE EDITORS

Amanda White (she/her) is Canada Research Chair in Sustainability, Ecological Justice, and Climate action in Creative Practices at Emily Carr University. She is an artist, researcher, and currently leads the Living Environmental Arts and Futures (LEAF) Kitchen & Lab at ECU, a new space supporting environmentally engaged creative research and practices including a focus on food. She co-edited the book Ecologies in Practice: Environmentally Engaged Arts in Canada (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2024) and recently published a graphic novel for middle grade readers about food security. www.amandawhite.com<http://www.amandawhite.com> <http://www.amandawhite.com>

Katie Lawson (she/her) is a curator, writer, and editor based in Toronto. She is currently a SSHRC-funded PhD candidate in Art and Visual Culture at Western University, where she works with the Centre for Sustainable Curating. She recently guest edited BlackFlash Magazine issue 40.3 (2024) with Yasmine Nurming-Por and was the Editorial Lead for the Toronto Biennial's major double catalogue Water, Kinship, Belief (2022). www.katieblawson.com<http://www.katieblawson.com> <http://www.katieblawson.com>

As members of the Creative Food Research Collaboratory, White and Lawson both served as editors for Creative Recipes for Food Justice, a curated publication series that pairs artists and research-creation practitioners with food studies scholars, food policy makers, and grassroots organizers to create “recipes” to address the most pressing issues related to food justice and policy. www.creativefoodresearch.ca<http://www.creativefoodresearch.ca> <http://www.creativefoodresearch.ca>

ABOUT THE JOURNAL

PUBLIC: Art | Culture | Ideas<https://www.publicjournal.ca> is an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal at the intersection of visual cultures and critical studies. Since 1988, it has served as an intellectual and creative forum charting the junctures of aesthetic, political, and social issues. In each themed instalment, PUBLIC encourages a wide-ranging dialogue by bringing together artists, theorists, curators, philosophers, creative writers, and historians.

PUBLIC is committed to supporting a diversity of voices, ideas, and perspectives in our publishing. We welcome contributions from those who identify as Black, Brown, Indigenous, and People of Colour (POC) of all abilities, genders, and sexual orientations. We are particularly interested in the perspectives of those whose voices have historically been diminished or excluded.


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mailman.ucalgary.ca/pipermail/acc-cca-l/attachments/20260915/5533b7b1/attachment.html>