2027 Cultivating Care Convening at UW-Madison
We're excited to announce the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a conference host for one of several AFHVS/ASFS convenings taking place in 2027. The theme for the Madison convening is Cultivating Care: Growing New American Food Systems, and we will be gathering from June 9-12, 2027.
We invite you to view the official call for abstracts here. Please note the submission deadline is January 15, 2027, with notification of acceptance on or before February 28, 2027.
The UW-Madison conference highlights work toward transitioning and transforming food systems through a lens of care. Current agricultural systems generate extreme economic disparity and overwhelming externalities—accounting for over a third of global GHG emissions, driving biodiversity collapse, exhausting soil health and perpetuating extractive and exploitative relations of production. Food systems are uniquely vulnerable to climate shocks, facing severe disruptions from extreme weather, drought, and supply chain volatility. Meanwhile, political upheaval, targeting of marginalized groups, the rise of Artificial Intelligence, and more, challenge the status quo and demand engagement with new ways of thinking about the structures, operations, and roles of food systems.
Addressing these challenges with care requires moving away from attempts at purely productivist and technological fixes and developing effective interventions to affect normative structural transformations. Such transformations would replace fossil-fuel-dependent monoculture landscapes with agroecological practices, research, and social movements toward re-embedding communities and empowering people to practice care in multiple ways.
The Madison event welcomes participation by the growing community of academics and professionals exploring alternative visions of food systems from numerous perspectives and approaches. Themes of interest include, but are not limited to:
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Food Is Medicine
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Soil quality and perennialization
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Indigenous food sovereignty
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Food systems and AI
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Agriculture and Markets of the Middle
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Agroecology: research, practice and movements
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Ethics, social justice, and normative change in food systems
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The Culinary Mind and civil society
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Anti-trust and regulatory efforts
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Power and path dependencies hindering change
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Pedagogy for complex systems
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Centering food systems labor
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Organizing for change