Presentation short abstract

This paper examines the decolonial role of food festivals in South Africa. By facilitating intergenerational knowledge transmission, strengthening collective practices, enhancing spiritual connections to the land and creating an environment of celebration, food festivals promote food sovereignty.

Presentation long abstract

Drawing on Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s (2009) concept of colonialism as dismemberment, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2015:32) writes: “Decoloniality can be understood as an overarching project of re-membering aimed at addressing problems of colonisation of the mind, alienation and fragmentation. …a restorative recovery project.” In light of the ongoing coloniality of the South African food system, such a restorative recovery project is deeply needed.

This paper examines the role of food festivals in challenging the coloniality of the food system. Drawing on research in three provinces of South Africa, where three different non-governmental organisations have supported communities to hold traditional food and seed festivals, the paper argues that food festivals can play a decolonial role. First, they facilitate intergenerational knowledge transmission, with elders passing on traditional food knowledge to young people through talks, demonstrations and collaboration. Second, they help to rebuild and strengthen collective food practices, as communities work together to organise the festival, prepare food and share seed in ways their ancestors did. Third, they contribute to the repair of traditional spiritual connections to the land by incorporating rituals and ceremonies traditionally linked to the agricultural calendar. And fourth, festivals create an environment of joy and celebration in which healing and recovery can take place. While the festivals differ in size, duration and format, they share a commitment to reviving traditional foods and the traditional cultural practices linked to them, as a step towards food sovereignty.

Presentation short abstract

This paper highlights the basket weaving and wild food harvesting practices of Mayeyi women which sustain ancestral knowledge and cultivate food sovereignty and ecological justice within contested conservation landscapes of north-eastern Namibia.

Presentation long abstract

This paper explores the wild foodways of the Mayeyi, a riverine people of northern Botswana and Namibia that historically resided across the Okavango-Kwando wetlands. Building on earlier work tracing the slow, intergenerational unmaking of Mayeyi multispecies relations through colonialism and contemporary conservation agendas, this research turns to the creative, embodied practices through which Mayeyi women continue to remember and sustain their wild foodways. Focusing on basket weaving as a modality of memory and resilience, the study documents the food baskets of the Mayeyi and their intimate entanglement with wild food species. Through participatory harvesting, dyeing, weaving and storytelling, baskets emerge not only as commodified tourist artefacts but as living repositories of ecological knowledge, ancestral memory, and everyday joy. These practices highlight the ways in which the Mayeyi cultivate food sovereignty within regulated conservation landscapes where access to wild species is restricted or criminalised. Attending to moments of collective harvesting and preparation, the paper shows how wild foods and basket making generate spaces of relationality that exceed economic valuations and open up futures rooted in restorative ecological justice.

Presentation short abstract

This work explores Cederberg foodways rooted in “health from the soil.” Through walking, gathering veldkos, cooking, and shared storytelling, it traces how land-based practices endure despite dispossession, and how community visions imagine decolonial, sovereign food futures.

Presentation long abstract

Gesond uit die grond (“health from the soil”) is a guiding expression within the Cederberg communities. It speaks to more than nutrition: it centres land as the ground of healthy food systems and points to relational, land-based foodways that have persisted through centuries of dispossession, conservation enclosures, and colonial control over plants, labour, and food. Grounded in community voices and relational ways of knowing, shared while wandering through the land, gathering veldkos (wild foods and herbs), cooking together, and listening to food stories, this contribution traces how local foodways remain rooted in deep relationships with Earth and with one another.

Using co-creative methods, the research traces the everyday practices through which people enact survival and resistance, as well as the ongoing challenges that undermine food sovereignty. Through “dream weaving” and a collective arts-and-film process, the work explores foodways as a circular continuum linking past, present, and future through people’s lived realities. The community visions offer glimpses of what a decolonial food system could look like and show how gesond uit die grond — food rooted in reciprocal human–nature relationships — continues to anchor local aspirations for food sovereignty.

Presentation short abstract

Ewa Domanska describes the ‘non-absent past’ as a past that refuses to go away. I highlight the continued struggles over resource access and economic opportunity across generations. Seeing history as a ‘non-absent past’, reveal how the transformative biodiversity economy fail to disrupt coloniality.

Presentation long abstract

Processes of value chain upgrading in biodiversity-based economies often result in the displacement of traditional users of non-timber forest products. Over time, these forest products have been reshaped by scientific and industrial revolutions and by sustainable development agendas that privilege scientific authority, market logics, and environmentalism aligned with capitalist interests - often at the expense of other forms of biodiversity economies. Although marginalized actors such as biodiversity and knowledge custodians have been formally recognized as key participants in biodiversity value chains ‘only’ since the late 1980s and early 1990s, efforts to include them frequently fail to dismantle entrenched access hierarchies or to restore the sovereignty lost under colonial and apartheid regimes. As a result, inclusion initiatives overlook silences, erasures, ongoing harms, material residues, and nonhuman actors that could otherwise illuminate transformative possibilities. Drawing on qualitative interviews, ethnographic archival analysis, and engaged scholarship, this paper shows that the honeybush sector, built around an endemic tea plant Indigenous to South Africa, mirrors these patterns of displacement and implements interventions that ultimately fail to disrupt coloniality in the biodiversity economy. Instead, such interventions often reproduce the hierarchies that historically excluded Colored, Black, and Indigenous South Africans from land, epistemic authority, and economic benefits associated with honeybush. Positioning history as a present past, the paper examines these hierarchies and forms of value-chain displacement, centering the generational voices of harvesters, cooperatives, and honeybush tea makers to identify pathways for restoring traditional users’ sovereignty and advancing economic justice in policy and in practice.

Presentation short abstract

This paper articulates practices of seed sovereignty across what was once the Fertile Crescent as instances of Arab futurism: world-making and place-making practice that disrupts space-time to break open new possibilities for the future.

Presentation long abstract

Cultivators, land stewards, agroecologists, biodiversity defenders, and artists in Palestine,

Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq are engaged in seed conservation and seed sharing practices that

break through checkpoints, state borders, and hegemonic narratives about the past and future

to create alternative timespace zones. Reaching into the past and future simultaneously, the

zones being created are enmeshed with counter memories, fugitivity, and experimentation to

create a sense of latent possibility about what else could be. This paper articulates practices of

seed sovereignty across what was once the Fertile Crescent as instances of Arab futurism:

world-making and place-making practice that disrupts space-time to break open new

possibilities for the future. What decolonial or anticolonial histories are cultivators digging up

in search for non-colonial ways of being with the land? What (non)sovereign futures might

we glimpse from current practices of seed conservation, archiving, and exchange in what was

once the Fertile Crescent? What can cultivators and seeds trying to survive wars teach us

about what life might be habitable amid ruin?

Presentation short abstract

Black diasporic communities in the Low Countries use food, gardening and land care to resist extractive systems and cultivate relational, just ecological futures rooted in everyday practice.

Presentation long abstract

This paper offers a grounded account of Black diasporic ecological practices in Belgium and the Netherlands, tracing how communities with roots in the Global South cultivate land-based autonomy and resist the ongoing coloniality embedded in European food and environmental systems. Building on narrative ethnography and participatory deep mapping with Black-led initiatives such as Back 2 Soil Basics (B2SB) and the farm of Mahécor, the only Black organic farmer in Flanders, the research highlights how food practices, seed exchanges, permaculture, and collective gardening function as everyday acts of refusal against racialised enclosures, greenwashed institutional agendas, and extractive understandings of land.

Centering ancestral memory and community knowledge, the contribution illuminates how Black diasporic ecological practices—shaped by histories of displacement, care, and intergenerational world-making—assert alternative relationships to land, food, and biodiversity that exceed market-based and technocratic models of sustainability. These practices enact forms of food and seed sovereignty grounded in relational ethics, reciprocal care, and more-than-human kinship, offering visions of ecological justice that speak back to the exclusions of mainstream European environmental discourse.

This project employs embodied and creative approaches, including storytelling, walking, collaborative mapping, and visual documentation, to co-produce knowledge with community members and to trace how ecological futures are already being practiced at the margins. By foregrounding Black diasporic ecologies as sites of resistance and resurgence, this work demonstrates how rooted stories can unsettle dominant political ecologies and open space for more just, situated, and culturally grounded environmental futures.

Presentation short abstract

This study examines how emerging peasant communities are dismantling the racial, environmental, land and labour injustices imposed by the sugarcane agroindustry in Alagoas, Northeast Brazil.

Presentation long abstract

This study explores repeasantisation as an alternative to unemployment and precarious work entrenched by the sugarcane agroindustry in Alagoas, Northeast Brazil. It examines how peasant communities are dismantling the racial, environmental, land and labour injustices imposed by agro-industrial exploitation that concentrates land, generates food insecurity and deepens inequalities. The study addresses a couple of questions, including (1) How does the transition from wage labour to peasantry take place? (2) What impact does this transition have on the understanding of racial capitalism? (3) What challenges do communities face in their quest for productive autonomy? (4) How does repeasantisation lead to a political economy/ecology that opposes the exploitation of labour and nature? The methodology includes the analysis of land occupations in the former Usina Laginha in União dos Palmares, where 4,000 families are involved in the struggle for land reform. The analysis combines ethnography, oral history interviews, documentary analysis and visual sociology. The aim is to produce knowledge relevant to peasant struggles for agrarian reform and to promote alternatives based on agroecology, food sovereignty, human well-being and the protection of biodiversity. The research aims to understand how autonomy, self-management and the defence of rights to land, culture, technology, decent work and the environment emerge. This will contribute to a deeper understanding of this particular process of repeasantisation with major social and political impact in Alagoas.

Presentation short abstract

Drawing on 2024–25 fieldwork and using storytelling as method, this presentation examines how food and care practices evolve within shifting cultural, social, and gendered dynamics in a predominantly Maasai village in Tanzania’s Simanjiro District.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines the relational, lived, and situated nature of food practices among the Maasai of Terrat Village in Simanjiro District, Tanzania, foregrounding how everyday engagements with food become sites of resilience, resurgence, and relational care in the face of socio-environmental and politico-economic change across Maasailand. Bringing together insights from anthropology, cultural geography, and feminist studies, and foregrounding indigenous knowledge, the paper shows how food is enacted across social, spatial, and ecological terrains, offering an alternative lens on pastoralist life that challenges dominant development narratives and ecological simplifications.

Drawing on qualitative fieldwork conducted in 2024-25 and using food stories as an ethnographic and creative method, the study contributes to broader conversations on relational carescapes enacted through situated food practices. Although Terrat has frequently been examined through the lenses of land tenure, conservation, and socio-ecological resilience, everyday food practices remain underexplored despite their centrality to negotiating shifting livelihoods under political pressure toward sedentarisation, expanding individual mobility, and ongoing cultural transformations. Through three situated narratives—olpul meat camps, loshoro as a distinctive milk-based practice, and pilau as a new, communal ritual food—the paper illustrates how Maasai communities sustain reciprocity, gendered responsibilities, and place-based ethics amid ongoing pressures on land, mobility, and biodiversity.

The paper argues that food stories offer a grounded, integrative lens for understanding evolving Maasai foodways. A relational conception of care—caring with or caring together—reveals both the possibilities and tensions involved in sustaining food, relationships, and community life amid socio-environmental and economic change.

Presentation short abstract

From confrontational resistance to creating a collective territorial model that bends traditional and academic knowledge, communities in Colombia shifted their strategies against disruption imposed by a river dam using family-based socioecological practices emerged from desired collective futures.

Presentation long abstract

The struggle for land and adaptation to environmental changes are part of a long history of the peasant and fishing communities of the lower Sinú River (Colombia). While disrupting their material reproduction and well-being, these challenges have also forged a culture of resistance and resilience in environmental conflicts. In this context, the Urrá Hydroelectric Dam (1987) became a new driver of change with serious negative consequences for the locals. The dam led to the loss of fisheries, reduced income, food shortages, and migration to other parts of the country. In addition, it exacerbated territorial conflict in the region between large landowners and small farmers and fishermen.

Emerging from social movements for land rights, local communities resisted the implementation of the dam through confrontational strategies, such as marches and highway blockades. These strategies were then altered due to violence and murders. Instead, they began to build a collectively model of local territorial development, combining traditional knowledge with academic knowledge (e.g., theories from Ostrom and Freire). This model, from a perspective of a desired collective future, aims to guarantee food sovereignty, income, territorial defense, and as a way of mitigating the environmental crisis. Centered around families and the concept of aesthetic beauty, it has its initial locus in houses (e.g., “socioecological backyards”) and expands to collective actions and projects of environmental protection, collective food production and commercialization. This case demonstrates the importance of collective action in building desired and socio-environmentally just futures as a way of counteracting the neo-extractivist model.