Call for Papers
We invite you to join us for the Seventeenth International Conference on Food Studies, the annual meeting of the Food Studies Research Network, hosted by Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, taking place in Paris, France and online.
The Food Studies Research Network brings together scholars, educators, practitioners, policymakers, producers, artists, designers, community organizers, and others working at the intersection of food, culture, health, environment, economy, and social life. The conference welcomes proposals that examine food not only as nourishment or commodity, but as a site of meaning, memory, inequality, care, labor, creativity, and collective possibility.
For more than a decade, the Food Studies Research Network has served as a leading international forum for scholars, practitioners, and community voices working across food cultures, food systems, and the social life of food. The 2027 conference comes at a moment when food studies speaks directly to some of the most pressing issues of our time: food insecurity, public health, climate change, agricultural and hospitality labor, migration, supply chains, food sovereignty, culinary heritage, and sustainable futures. We welcome interdisciplinary proposals that engage these questions through research, practice, policy, pedagogy, community work, and creative inquiry.
Themes
Special Focus: Food, Care, Labor: The Politics of Everyday Life
The 2027 special focus, Food, Care, Labor: The Politics of Everyday Life, invites participants to examine the everyday practices, relationships, and systems through which food is grown, prepared, distributed, shared, consumed, regulated, and imagined.
Food is care work. It is family work, community work, gendered work, migrant work, agricultural work, hospitality work, institutional work, and often invisible work. It is also knowledge work: knowing how to grow, cook, preserve, serve, heal, organize, and sustain. Across homes, restaurants, farms, schools, hospitals, markets, neighborhoods, and digital platforms, food reveals how societies value labor, organize responsibility, and distribute vulnerability.
At the same time, food is central to urgent debates about climate change, public health, migration, urban life, rural futures, food sovereignty, cultural heritage, technology, and economic justice. Who feeds whom? Who is fed well, and who is left hungry? Whose labor is recognized, protected, or exploited? How do food practices carry histories of place, identity, colonialism, resistance, and belonging? What forms of care become possible when food is understood as a shared social and ecological responsibility?
We welcome proposals that address food as a material practice and as a social system, embedded in everyday life and shaped by institutions, infrastructures, policies, markets, and planetary change.
Themes:
- Theme 1: Care and Everyday Life
- Theme 2: Labor, Markets, and Power
- Theme 3: Justice, Health, and Access
- Theme 4: Cultures, Ecologies, and Futures
Knowledge Experience and Format
The conference is organized as a hybrid knowledge experience, integrating in-person and online participation within a unified scholarly environment.
For in-person delegates in Paris, the conference is designed as a human-scale gathering shaped by conversation, shared inquiry, and place-based exchange. Sessions, talking circles, breaks, lunches, and informal encounters create opportunities to connect research with lived experience, to think together about food not only as an object of study, but as something practiced, shared, and felt.
For online delegates, the conference is more than a remote viewing option. Accepted proposals become Presentation Pages where presenters share abstracts, media, and supporting materials. Delegates participate through live online sessions, asynchronous engagement, and discussion spaces that remain available before, during, and after the event.
Across both formats, the emphasis is on reciprocal exchange rather than one-way presentation. Whether joining in Paris or online, participants are part of a shared knowledge environment where ideas can be presented, discussed, revisited, and developed into future collaborations, publications, and community connections.
Publication Pathways
Presenters are invited to develop their work for possible publication in Food Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, the peer-reviewed journal of the Food Studies Research Network.
Join Us
We warmly invite you to submit a proposal and join us, either in Paris or online, for the Seventeenth International Conference on Food Studies.
Together, we will examine food as one of the most powerful ways to understand everyday life: how we care, labor, gather, remember, organize, struggle, and imagine more sustainable and just futures.
Sincerely,
Dr. Barbara Formis, Conference Chair, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, France
Dr. Hennie Fisher, Research Network Chair, University of Pretoria, South Africa
Dr. Blanca Rosa Aguilar Uscanga, Research Network Chair (ES), University of Guadalajara, Mexico
Dr. Phillip Kalantzis-Cope, Chief Social Scientist, Common Ground Research Networks, United States of America