Foodways: Rooted, Made, Shared, Imagined

Kahn Institute Long-Term Project, 2026–27

Meeting time: Thursdays 4:30–7:30 p.m.

Organizing Fellows

Suleiman Mourad, Religion and Middle East Studies
Javier Puente, Latin American & Latino/a Studies and Lewis Global Studies Center

Project Description

Foodways encapsulate the human experience and shape their personhood, social interactions, and relations to their natural world. Modernity has complicated this relationship, with both positive and adverse effects. The recent 2020 global COVID-19 pandemic and escalating military conflicts around the world further highlighted crucial and structural vulnerabilities and inequities in food, foodways, and food systems, with larger reverberations on the cultural, political, and economic significance of food amidst widespread uncertainties and imminent societal collapse. These disruptive crises, coupled with the current global authoritarian turn, cultivate an urgent need to interrogate the centrality of food to daily life and society, whether in kitchens, factories, laboratories, farms, or think tanks across the globe or in our backyards. Foodways, broadly construed, also offer opportunities to explore the multiple registers of the material, experiential, and metaphysical aspects of the human experience. How might ingredients and their consumption offer a window into understanding memory, identity, indigeneity, rituals, biology, and health in the context of uncertainty and inequity? Foodways provide an opportunity to consider the circulation of goods (local/global), knowledge (recipes/techniques), people (migration), technology, and taste, which embeds us in socio-political, psychological, as well as human-made and natural environments across time and space with unintended and intentional consequences.

This Kahn project invites colleagues from all disciplines, divisions, and ranks whose teaching, research, or writing intersect with the study of food to consider what it can reveal at this post-pandemic moment about the complex and multifaceted dynamic between individuals and society.

Join us to create, stimulate, and sustain a conversation about food and foodways that could endure beyond the seminar. Some potential outcomes might include new collaborative curricular offerings and research directions. There may also be a possibility for one or two participants to attend for one semester. We will meet throughout the academic year on Thursdays from 4:30 to 7:30. Dinner will be provided (and in a few cases, it will be prepared by the fellows themselves).

A project information session for faculty and staff is scheduled for Monday, September 22, 4:30–5:30 p.m. Participants may join in person at the Kahn Institute, 21 Henshaw or by Zoom. Refreshments provided.

Apply by Wednesday, October 15 with a statement of interest. Please describe, in approximately 200 words, how your research connects to the topic of the project and how the project would benefit your research.