Tag Archives: News

SEMINAR TODAY (28 April, 2.30pm NZT): Change in Papua New Guinea’s Fresh Food Marketplaces Over the Past 60 Years

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Fresh food marketplaces are vital to food security, livelihoods, and the national economy in Papua New Guinea. They are spaces of both strong continuity with the past, but also of considerable transformation, particularly in the last 20 years. Marketplaces have spread geographically, and operate more often. There have also been shifts in what is being sold, and who is selling the produce, including the gender composition of vendors. Market chains have also grown in complexity.

In this seminar, based on a recently published paper in Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies, Dr Mark Busse and colleagues bring together research on marketplaces from 1961 to 2022, based on their own field studies and an extensive review of the literature. Dr Busse and colleagues will summarise the changes, examine their causes, and explore their development implications.

The seminar is hosted by the Crawford School of Public Policy at ANU and will be synchronously Zoom linked to the University of Papua New Guinea.

Registration is still open! To register, visit the registration page.

Save the Date: Australasian Agri-Food Research Network conference 2023

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We are delighted to announce that the next Australasian Agri-Food Research Network conference will be held in Hobart/nipaluna, Tasmania/lutrawita from December 4-7, 2023.

Hosted by the University of Tasmania, the theme of the conference is: Place-Based Agri-Food Systems in a Time of Climate Crisis: Resilience, Resistance and Regeneration. As with previous conferences, there will be a pre-conference field trip on Monday December 4, a trivia night, and a conference dinner.

PhD scholarship opportunity: Food system resilience at the University of Melbourne

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There is an exciting opportunity available for a PhD scholarship in the resilience of urban food systems with Professor Sarah Bell, City of Melbourne Chair in Urban Resilience and Innovation at the University of Melbourne, co-supervised by Dr Rachel Carey. Applications are due on 31 October.

More information is available here.

New book publication

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Congratulations to all those involved in the new open access book Beyond Global Food Supply Chains: Crisis, Disruption, Regeneration.

Edited by Victoria Stead and Melinda Hinkson, the collection takes the upheaval of the pandemic as a springboard from which to interrogate a larger set of structural, environmental and political fault lines running through the global food system. In a context in which disruptions to the production, distribution and consumption of food are figured as exceptions to the smooth, just-in-time efficiencies of global supply chains, the essays examine the pandemic not simply as a particular and acute moment of disruption but rather as a lens on a deeper, longer set of structural processes within which disruption is endemic.

The thirteen chapters offer short, sharp interventions that track disruptive forces & political possibilities at key points along the global food supply chain – and, critically, beyond it. They traverse subjects ranging from agri-investment to corporate and alternative food production systems, labour relations, pandemic supermarkets, logistics systems, the politics of hunger, the limits of consumer ethics, and the possibilities of supply chain disruptions as moments of reprieve. They offer rich, generative reflections on the contemporary global food system, and would also be very well suited to being used as teaching resources.

Chapters

  1. Introduction: Beyond global supply chains by Melinda Hinkson and Victoria Stead
  2. Supply chains as disruption by Lauren Rickards and Melinda Hinkson
  3. Agri-investment cashing in on COVID-19 by Sarah Sippel
  4. Putting the crisis to work by Victoria Stead and Kirstie Petrou
  5. Going against the grain in the West Australian wheatbelt by Kelly Donati
  6. Reviving community agrarianism in post-socialist China by Daren Shi-Chi-Leung
  7. Fantasies of logistics in Aotearoa New Zealand by Matthew Henry and Carolyn Morris
  8. Reproducing hunger in pandemic America by Maggie Dickinson
  9. The pandemic supermarket by David Boarder Giles
  10. Disruption as reprieve? by Jon Altman and Francis Markham
  11. The UN Food Systems Summit: Disaster capitalism and the future of food by Tomaso Ferrando
  12. Against consumer ethics by Christopher Mayes and Angie Sassano
  13. Afterword: Temporary measures by Alex Blanchette

The book is available free to download here.

Food Utopias, (Mature) Care, and Hope – published

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Congratulations to AFRN member Paul Stock on the publication of his article Food Utopias, (Mature) Care, and Hope in The International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food.

Here is his abstract for the article:
The current period is one of worry and concern over collapse. While many still go hungry, we anticipate a future of food without farmers. Yet in the wake of multiple disasters, the new can emerge. With a focus on food systems centred on care, utopias provide us with tools for dialogue that communicate problems, but also point to possible pathways forward. Following a theory of (mature) care focused on agri-food, food utopias offers a trialectic of critique, experimentation, and process to shape agri-food scholarship of the hopeful, care-centred stories of food and transformation. In combination with ideas about agri-food systems futures, this paper offers examples of care and food utopias from the US Midwest. This is an invitation to combine feminist ideas of care theory and food utopias scholarship that can help broaden our understanding of justice and scholarship around food, farmers, community, and feeding the world.

Stock, P. V. (2021) “Food Utopias, (Mature) Care, and Hope”, The International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food. Paris, France, 27(2), pp. 89–107. doi: 10.48416/ijsaf.v27i2.92.

Call for Sessions: New Zealand Geographical Society Conference, 23-25 Nov 2022

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The organising committee for the 2022 New Zealand Geographical Society (NZGS) Conference are pleased to announce the dates and some details for the 2022 conference. They are also inviting themed session proposals at this time.

Conference details

23-25 Nov 2022, University of Canterbury, Ilam Campus (hosted by the Canterbury Branch of the NZGS).

Key dates

Call for sessions & proposals for pre-conference events opens 7 March 2022

Call for sessions and pre-conference events closes 26 April 2022

Call for abstracts opens 13 May 2022

Call for abstracts closes 1 July 2022

Registration opens 8 August 2022

Check the conference website for more details about keynote speakers, pre-conference events and field trips as these become available.

Call for sessions

The following themes for the conference have guided our selection of keynote speakers. Themed session proposals and abstracts can address these themes or wider themes in human and physical geography.

  • Resilience in the context of environmental change, governance and/or justice
  • Well-being and health approaches to resilience
  • Recovery and regenerative development: solutions, approaches, methodologies and practices for social and/or ecological restoration
  • Resilience in the context of counter geographies
  • Resilience in the context of place-based, community grassroots geographies

Organised sessions provide the  opportunity to bring together a number of experts to present and discuss their work and perspectives. Sessions may take the form of presentations/papers, panel discussions, workshops or other innovative formats or interventions.

Please submit your session proposal by 26 April 2022 by visiting the NZGS 2022 Conference website or click here. Please include a 150-200 word abstract, up to five keywords and details (names, contacts) of the organisers.

Once accepted, sessions will be advertised on the conference website, allowing delegates to submit papers to specific sessions.

If you have any questions about organising a session, or about the conference in general, please contact the organisers at info@nzgsconference2022.co.nz

Agrifood Research Network Meeting

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Venue: Lincoln University, Aotearoa New Zealand
Date: 24-26 November 2021

AFRN have been invited to join in with the Sociology Association of Aotearoa New Zealand (SAANZ) conference this year. As this is a face-to-face only conference, so it is likely that this will only be relevant to agrifooders in AotearoaNZ.

There will be an AFRN-tagged panel with a number of sessions at SAANZ. The SAANZ theme of Well-being, Engagement and Sustainability will be relevant to many agrifooders. However, as usual, we welcome papers on any aspect of the agrifood system.

If you are thinking of attending, please contact Carolyn Morris.

Registration and abstract submissions are open via the SAANZ Conference website.
When you submit your abstract please note that you want to be in the AFRN stream at the bottom of your abstract. Abstracts are due 30 September 2021 and registrations close 5 November 2021.