We look forward to seeing many of SAFN’s members at the AAA meeting in New Orleans. For those of you attending the event, we are sharing a list of SAFN sponsored special events and sessions below. We invite you to share your food and nutrition-related sessions with us through our FoodAnthro listserv, or directly with us. We will add session details to this post.
SAFN Sponsored Special Events
- SAFN and C&A Mentoring Breakfast
- Thursday, Nov. 20: 8 am – 9:30 am, Sheraton, Orpheus Room (8th floor). Waitlist only.
- Graduate Students and Postdocs/Early Career Mixer
- Thursday, Nov. 20: 7:30 pm, Backspace Bar & Kitchen
- Join us in the evening on Thursday, November 20th for the yearly social mixer for graduate students and postdocs sponsored by Culture & Agriculture and the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition. Following Keynote by Jason de Leon.
- SAFN, C&A, and SEA Reception
- Friday, Nov. 21: 6:30 – 9:30 pm, Disappear Here
- All are welcome! Friday Nov 21, 6:30pm to 9:30pm at Disappear Here, 301 N. Peters Street. Join Culture & Agriculture, AND the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition, AND the Society for Economic Anthropology for a joint reception!
- Environmental Justice Tour & Session (SEA, SAFN)
- Waitlist only. Saturday 10 am – 11:30 pm, conference center to Treme Market Branch
- Lunch and afternoon sessions 12 – 4 pm
SAFN Sponsored Sessions
1905 How Foods Haunt Places: Sugarcane, Soybeans, Shrimp, Figs, Teff, Cotton, Olive Oil, etc.”
- Start Date: 11/20/2025 2:30 PM 4:00 PM
- Venue: Marriott
- Room: MGB Salon F/G
- How do foods haunt places? What forms of belonging emerge or vanish when specters of adversity confront agricultural livelihoods? How do differently positioned individuals and communities negotiate the ghosts of familiar worlds while positioning themselves within global or local supply chains?
7120 The Many Specters of Food and Aid: Learning from the Past and Present to Feed the Future
- Start Date: 11/22/2025 2:30 PM 4:00 PM
- Venue: Sheraton
- Room: Grand Ballroom D (5th fl)
- This panel will explore how the futures of feeding and being fed are shaped by environmental histories, migration patterns, the plight and precarity of food workers, and the death of federal agencies. Collectively, our papers consider what anthropology has to offer the study of food futures in both the US and global context and what continues to haunt us as scholars seeking to understand the interwoven challenges within food and humanitarian aid systems.
SAFN Member Sessions – Sessions of interest to SAFN’s members will be added below.
7373 Eerie Overlaps in Food Sovereignty and Nationalism
- Part 1: 11/21/2025 12:45 PM – 2:15 PM
- Part 2: 2:30 PM – 4:00 PM
- Venue: Marriott
- Room: Balcony L
- Food justice, food sovereignty, food security, and efforts to ensure access to good food are generally understood as positive goals, but when people with commitments to ethnonationalist ideologies or advocacy for punitive criminal justice efforts can be under the same umbrella as emancipatory, racial justice, and anti-colonial efforts, then the umbrella concepts deserve greater scrutiny and examination. This panel explores the various ways causes drawing from opposed political viewpoints can fall under the same food politics, and how we as anthropologists should respond to that reality.
1387 The Ghosts We Eat: Unseen Entities Forming and Deforming Our Food Systems Start
- Date: 11/22/2025 10:15 AM – 11:45 AM
- Venue: Sheraton Room: Edgewood AB (4th fl)
- Type: Executive Roundtable/Townhall
- This roundtable focuses on the ghosts, the unseen and immaterial but acting entities that form and deform our global food systems, and which we ingest, sometimes unaware. Of special interest are the ghosts of the past, and ghosts we refer to in shorthand as of present. Following the work of Thompson, Stoler, Tsing and others, past ghosts include ecological traces of multiple more-thanhuman histories, including the afterlives of colonialism, plantations and plantation technologies. Here, we think also of the material debris of colonialism, of camps that may change from being colonial to migrant, labor to refugee in function or name. (…)The roundtable juxtaposes the visual-sensory with the textual in order to understand the haunting of bodies – of humans, societies, food, landscapes and waterways – as well as of the contemporary and future otherwise. In this historical moment, we find it critical to examine the ghosts we eat, the beauty and brutality in the food we consume, specters that become part of our bodies, inflecting our individual and collective futures.
- Organizer: Seth M. Holmes, University of California, Berkeley, Mael Vizcarra Presenter(s): Alesandra Tatic, Universitat de Barcelona, Gerardo Rodriguez-Solis, University of California, Berkeley, Paul Sperneac-Wolfer , Mael Vizcarra , Heather Paxson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Anthropology, Dvera Saxton , Brenda Gutierrez Mora Discussant: Cristiana Bastos, University of Lisbon, Seth M. Holmes, University of California, Berkeley
