CfP EASST/4S 2020 “Unpacking Food Chains: Knowledge-Making, Biotechnoscience, and Multispecies Connectivity in Troubled Societies”

Mariko Yoshida Announcement
Announcement Type
Call for Papers
Subject Fields
Anthropology, Animal Studies, Humanities, Environmental History / Studies

Dear colleagues,

Please consider submitting a paper abstract to our panel “Unpacking Food Chains: Knowledge-Making, Biotechnoscience, and Multispecies Connectivity in Troubled Societies” for the EASST/4S conference in Prague (August 18 – 21, 2020). The theme of EASST 2020 is “Locating and Timing Matters: Significance and Agency of STS in Emerging Worlds” https://easst.net/easst-4s-2020/

Deadline for paper proposals

February 29th, 2020
 

Convenors

Mariko YOSHIDA, The Australian National University

Shiaki KONDO, Hokkaido University

 

Panel Abstract

STS scholarship has addressed a variety of topics with perspectives drawn from the intersection between political ecology of food and multispecies anthropology, such as the microbiopolitics of raw dairy consumption (Paxson 2013), food sovereignty in the aftermath of infectious zoonotic diseases (Keck 2015; Lowe 2010; Porter 2019), or/and the reconstruction of labor and domestication of industrial animals entangled with nonhuman biological agents such as viruses and parasitic microbes (Blanchette 2015). This panel aims to bring together empirical research on the implications of biotechnologies in the contemporary food industry, which unfold relationalities of ambiguous agents, a so-called “quasi-species” (Lowe 2010). We will examine how interests of actors including small-scale producers, consumers, scientific experts, and administrative institutions reconfigure the notion of ecologies and power. This panel will trace the far-reaching range of focus areas and methodological approaches that are pertinent to questions of environmental and food governance, the role of biotechnologies that achieve optimization for cost efficiency and high value-added products, and the implication for resource management. Potential topics include but are not limited to: the socio-technical imaginaries underlying food justice; knowledge practices in shaping commodity food chains; infrastructures of food risk and safety; the construction of food-related ethics surrounding genetically-modified organisms, synthetic biology, and mass DNA sequencing; multi-species networks in agri- and aquaculture systems at local, national, and global levels; the continuities and ruptures among hygiene management, scientific frameworks, and lay expertise; and intersections between modes of food production and conservation technologies.


Abstracts to be submitted directly via 4S/EASSTs website. Log in here: https://convention2.allacademic.com/one/ssss/prague20/

After you log in, click “Submit A New Proposal,” and then “Papers For Open Panels.” Scroll down through the list of open panels where you will find “Unpacking Food Chains: Knowledge-Making, Biotechnoscience, and Multispecies Connectivity in Troubled Societies.” Submissions should consist of a paper title (50 words maximum) and a paper abstract (250 words maximum).

If you have any other questions, please do get in touch with both of us: Mariko Yoshida (mariko.yoshida@anu.edu.au) and Shiaki Kondo (shiaki.kondo@let.hokudai.ac.jp). Please feel free to share.
 

Best wishes,
Mariko and Shiaki

Contact Information

Mariko Yoshida (mariko.yoshida@anu.edu.au) and Shiaki Kondo (shiaki.kondo@let.hokudai.ac.jp)

Contact Email
mariko.yoshida@anu.edu.au