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Food System Temporalities

Datum
09. Jan­u­ar – 10. Jan­u­ar 2025 

Two-Day-Con­fer­ence at Uni­ver­si­ty of Cambridge


Work­shop „Food Sys­tem Temporalities”
Jan­u­ary 9th and 10th, 2025
Uni­ver­si­ty of Cambridge
Ali­son Richard Build­ing, Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge, Cam­bridge, UK
Organ­is­ers: Eliz­a­beth Fox (Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge) & Thomas White (King’s Col­lege London)
Keynote Speak­er: Prof Heather Pax­son (MIT)

This two-day con­fer­ence seeks to exam­ine the tem­po­ral­i­ty of food pro­duc­tion, cir­cu­la­tion, and con­sump­tion. By high­light­ing how time and its reck­on­ing shape and are shaped by the pur­suit of the edi­ble, our aim is to move beyond sim­plis­tic dichotomies between cap­i­tal­ist accel­er­a­tion and slow food sus­tain­abil­i­ty to elu­ci­date food’s dis­junc­tive rhythms and the work that goes into man­ag­ing them.

Stud­ies of food and food sys­tems have tend­ed to pri­ori­tise space, or place, over time. How­ev­er, the pro­duc­tion, cir­cu­la­tion, and con­sump­tion of food are also inher­ent­ly time-bound process­es that involve numer­ous tem­po­ral regimes, the man­age­ment of which require dis­tinct forms of work. Pro­duc­ing edi­ble things requires nav­i­gat­ing sea­sons, growth cycles, mar­ket fluc­tu­a­tions, and food’s inher­ent per­isha­bil­i­ty. We ask, for exam­ple, how does a tem­po­ral lens on grow­ing, pick­ing, slaugh­ter­ing, stor­ing, or fer­ment­ing lead us to recon­cep­tu­alise the labour of mak­ing or metabolis­ing the edi­ble? How might ques­tions of food sov­er­eign­ty and food jus­tice be approached dif­fer­ent­ly with ref­er­ence to time, rather than loca­tion? How are changes to sea­son­al rhythms caused by cli­mate change affect­ing the ways food pro­duc­ers antic­i­pate the future? Are new ‘time-less’ food labelling regimes chang­ing atti­tudes to per­isha­bil­i­ty and waste? What about the bod­ies of ani­mals, pushed to mature at ever faster rates in the inter­ests of prof­it or sus­tain­abil­i­ty? We wel­come empir­i­cal and the­o­ret­i­cal inter­ro­ga­tions of these and relat­ed questions.

Please sub­mit abstracts of approx­i­mate­ly 300 words to Eliz­a­beth Fox (ef434@cam.ac.uk) by August 31st 2024.