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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.