Call for Proposals: Food, Farms, and Community: Rural America’s Local Food Renaissance

Posted by on January 5, 2009

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

Food, Farms, and Community: Rural America’s Local Food Renaissance
The Second Annual Rural Heritage Institute at Sterling College

June 16-18, 2009
Sterling College
Craftsbury Common, VT

Panel, workshop, presentation, and roundtable proposals are solicited for The Second Annual Rural Heritage Institute at Sterling College, a three-day series of experiential academic workshops scheduled for June
16-18th 2009.
This year’s theme, Food, Farms, and Community focuses on the changing connections between rural communities and their food sources. The local food theme will be highlighted by discussions, field trips, and hands-on workshops featuring food historians, agricultural scientists, farmers, policy makers, journalists, artists, chefs, and food activists.

Northern Vermont has recently attracted national media attention for its growing local food network created and supported by area farmers, entrepreneurs, and community members. The Institute will consider
emerging local food businesses and their capacity for developing agricultural economies, the health and cultural benefits of local food, local eateries and their farming partners, and a historical look at the back to the land movement and a return to traditional farming methods.

The Institute’s host venue, Sterling College is located only 30 miles from the Canadian border in the heart of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom and is an ideal place to explore a community’s connection to food,
farming, and cultural identity. The intimate atmosphere of this Institute (between 40-60 participants) can empower generative conversations among a broad range of practitioners, teachers, scholars, community members, and under/graduate students — participants who share an interest in exploring the growing local food movement as they delve into the intersections of nature, culture, and economy in the rural Northeast.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

* Sustainable Agriculture
* Farmstead and Folk Arts
* Traditional Foodways
* The Rural Artisan
* Husbandry
* New Economy Agriculture
* Farm to Table Programs
* Radical Consumption
* Slow Food
* The Literature of Farming
* Nutrition
* Gender and Food Production
* Oral History and Community Memory
* Animal-Powered Agriculture
* Agrarianism
* Cottage Industries
* Farm Mutualism
* Glocalism and Globalization
* Bioregionalism
* Slow Money
* Farmstead Architecture
* Community-Based Food Systems
* Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)
* Local Food: The New Organic

Preference will be given to presentations, panels, workshops, and roundtables that use an interdisciplinary and/or participatory approach.

Please email one-page proposals to Pavel Cenkl ([email protected]) by February 2nd, 2009.