Format/Structure

This panel will consist of oral presentations followed by a moderated discussion. Each presenter will share a 12–15-minute talk.

Long Abstract

Food systems are increasingly framed as sites of crisis and transformation—ecologically, socially, and politically. Yet, the fundamental questions of who shapes these systems, who benefits from them, and who is excluded remain deeply contested. This panel invites critical political ecology scholarship that interrogates the power relations embedded in food systems, with particular attention to knowledge, stewardship, access, control, and contestation over lands, markets, technologies and resources.

We aim to explore the intersecting roles of hegemony, producer agency, resistance, and capitalist restructuring in shaping opportunities for farmers, growers, and food producers across rural and urban spaces. How do policies, development interventions, technologies, land regimes, and market dynamics reflect and reproduce broader structures of inequality? How do marginalized smallholder (urban and rural) populaces, indigenous communities, feminist perspectives, along with alternative economies transform or reimagine dominant food paradigms?

This is a timely moment to examine how food systems are governed, by whom, and to what ends, as globalization rapidly brings about transformations especially as narratives of sustainability, innovations, climate adaptation and, risk obscuring deeper issues of dispossession, labor exploitation, and ecological degradation. We welcome presentations that draw on empirical and theoretical work from diverse geographies, disciplinary perspectives, including those focused on the Global South, post-colonial contexts, indigenous studies, food sovereignty, epistemic injustices within rural and urban foodscapes.

This multiple oral presentation-based panel advances the scholarship of critical Food system studies, from a political ecology lens, by examining how structural power relations and hegemonic processes shape food production across diverse spaces, while revealing how producers can create alternative futures through collective organizing, resource sharing, social learning and spatial practices that challenge dominant food system logics. This panel invites transdisciplinary dialogue on the political ecology of food systems and offer space for plural narratives and imaginaries of more just, inclusive and sustainable futures.

This Panel has 22 pending paper proposals.
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