Is it possible to just do food studies? Critical food scholarship at a crossroads

Association for the Study of Food and Society

Toronto, Ontario

June 23 – 25, 2027

This convening builds on momentum fostered over the past five years through organized sessions at various international conferences, purpose-organized events and conferences, informal virtual meetings and networks, and multiple publications, including a new edited collection titled Hungry for Change: How Campuses Are Transforming Food Systems (Classens and Lawler, UofT Press). This work has highlighted the praxis of what we term critical campus food studies, while developing a scholarly lexicon, methodological approaches, and conceptional tools with which to interrogate and theorize campus foodscapes within their specific institutional dynamics and the broader structural dynamics that shape food systems and the postsecondary sector.

This work is motivated by the perspective that critical food pedagogy and scholarship stand at forced inflection points. The breadth and depth of the polycrisis/permacrisis, combined with revanchist austerity and authoritarian intrusions in the postsecondary sector have destabilized the conceptual and practical moorings of the (sub)fields (Classens and Lawler, 2026). Certainly, in some respects, it’s always been thus, and motivated scholars have found spaces of refuge and ways of being in, but not of the university (Harney and Moten, 2013. See also hooks, 2003; Giroux, 2025). Yet the mainstreaming of a reactionary politics that clearly sees education and research as interventions that frustrate authoritarian ends forces critical scholars further into the shadows, while threatening to destabilize the social, cultural, and material conditions within which the work we do is deployed and reproduced.

At the same time, as food scholars in the settler colonial world, we have a specific historical configuration to reckon with – a triumvirate of colonial expansion, agriculture, and the establishment of the university system in North America. The Morrill Land-Grant Act, enacted in 1862, effectively conscripted universities into the service of colonialism by gifting stolen land to post-secondary institutions that taught agriculture (see Sayre, 2022). Importantly, as Kaitlyn Harvey points out, university and colleges were “built not just on Indigenous land, but with Indigenous land.” Her work reveals a far-reaching pattern of institutional expansion that relied on the leasing and selling of enormous tracts of stolen Indigenous lands to raise universities’ endowment capital. (Harvey, 2021, 97). Over the course of the past century and a half, this architecture has supported practical teaching and research in support, largely, of corporate, colonial, industrial agriculture (LaCharite, 2016).

As a counterpoint to this history, and out of concern of attending to the climate crisis, biodiversity collapse, geopolitical instability, and ongoing structural violence and oppression – critical food systems scholars have developed a range of approaches “not just concerned with any type of change but with change that addresses power and injustice” (Sumner, 2016, xix). Meek and Tarlau (2016) insist that food systems scholars must reckon with an explicitly political choice to “use education to reproduce the current food system, raise awareness about the inequities of the food system, or utilize education as a means to form individuals who are determined to transform the food system” (p. 246, emphasis added). These interventions gesture towards critical food systems pedagogy and research praxis within which theorizing socioecological justice and equity within food systems directly informs movements for food systems transformation, both on campus and beyond it. While the emergent question of how to do this work within the aggressively neoliberal, authoritarian university introduces uncertainty, it may also bring openings – fissures of possibility through which to explore and expand the very foundations of the (sub)field(s) of food studies.

Accordingly, we seek contributions that bring the postsecondary campus and its various dynamics into view and that reckon with the challenge of doing critical food scholarship and pedagogy (however one defines it) within this ambivalent, antagonistic, at times hostile environment. We invite contributions from staff, students, and faculty, at any career stage. We call for creative submissions, papers, organized panels, workshops, and other means of knowledge sharing and mobilization on a variety of themes, including but not limited to:

·      Black and Indigenous food sovereignty on campus, and beyond

·      Maintaining reciprocal community-campus relationships in an age of austerity

·      Alternative institutional procurement models that promote just and sustainable relations

·      Critical food pedagogy in an age of anti-woke legislation and fascism

·      Prefigurative campus food systems alternatives, student organizers, and student-staff-faculty alliances

·      Histories of dispossession, agriculture, and the university

·      Collective struggle with and between organized labour (food service works, faculty, students, staff, etc.)

·      The politics of campus culinary infrastructure

Please send 150-250 word description of your proposed session, paper, or intervention, along with author/contributor names and affiliations to Michael Classens (Michael.classens@utoronto.ca) by December 17, 2027. More details to follow here.