Short Abstract

Digital foodscapes are key sites where future social values, inequalities and alternative possibilities for living well are negotiated and enacted. This panel fosters interdisciplinary exchange to explore how digital technologies are mobilised to imagine and perform potential food futures.

Description

This panel introduces the concept of ‘digital foodscapes’ (Goodman and Jaworska, 2020, Allgaier et al. 2025) as an interdisciplinary lens to grasp and investigate how everyday spaces, discourses and practices around food, nutrition and health are changing with and through digitalisation. Digital foodscapes encompass the shifting relations between people, technologies and material infrastructures in relation to food and eating. They shape how individuals encounter information, form food interests and make choices about what to eat, while also mediating collective understandings of what counts as ‘good’, ‘healthy’ or ‘sustainable’ food (Stehrenberger et al. 2024). These processes unfold not only through technological innovation but also through shifting cultural meanings and embodied practices of everyday shopping, cooking and eating.

Building on research around socio-technical imaginaries (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015) and techniques of futuring (Oomen et al. 2021), this panel explores how digital technologies are mobilised to imagine and perform potential food futures. Across policy, industry and everyday contexts, digitalisation is entangled with promises, hype and expectations of transformation, whether through AI-driven nutrition, smart kitchens or data-based sustainability. We invite contributions that analyse how visions of future food systems emerge, circulate and are enacted across different sites. The panel seeks to interrogate how digitalisation features within these visions, and why certain visions gain social traction while others remain exclusionary, marginal or contested.

By bringing together scholars from science and technology studies, food studies, media studies and related fields, this panel aims to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue on the performativity of digital foodscapes. It asks how digital infrastructures, data practices and visual cultures not only represent but actively shape ideas of sustainability, health, care and more. Through this lens, digital foodscapes emerge as key sites where future social values, inequalities and alternative possibilities for living well in a digital age are negotiated and enacted.

This Traditional Open Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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