Food communities empowerment. Research dialogue on community-based foodways

Research dialogue on community-based foodways

The symposium aims to create a dialogical space about research and work experiences making visible how local communities resist food insecurity through culturally grounded and ecologically sustainable practices. Engaging with communities focusing on wheat, dairy, and intertidal fishing supply chains, the objective of the symposium is to reflect on how participatory and immersive approaches, including storytelling, mapping, and visual methods can reveal untold aspects of food systems, not merely as functional responses to need, but as cultural ecologies of conviviality, care, and resilience, often in tension with the homogenizing logics of industrial agriculture.

The event also aims to bring different research experiences into dialogue with approaches used in grassroots aid projects, and ultimately, with theoretical and methodological perspectives that offer alternatives to external standardized solutions to food scarcity. The discussion will delve into the strategies communities have to navigate challenges through collective, everyday agency, and transnational solidarities. The discussion will investigate two key questions: What can we learn from multi-sited research on community-based food entanglements, and how can it help us understand novel pathways (either including or excluding aid) to overcome economic, socio-environmental, and political crises? And what does it mean to adopt post-development and feminist perspectives in the struggle against food poverty and against the imposition of new global food policies?

The symposium will be accompanied by a multimedia exhibition that extends this dialogue, translating these insights into photographs, community narratives, and maps that explore situated practices of production, distribution, and consumption, while foregrounding values often overlooked by globalized, profit-driven systems. This event, thus, offers not only a window into alternative food practices, but also a space for re-imagining pathways toward ecological justice, social equity, and material emancipation.

Registration until 9/10/2025

Host or Publisher Società Geografica Italiana