Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment Journal
Call for Special Issue Proposals (publication date December 2021)
Culture, Agriculture, Food, and Environment (CAFE)
Megan Styles & Debarati Sen, Co-Editors
Deadline: November 1, 2020
The editors of Culture, Agriculture, Food, and Environment (CAFE), a peer-reviewed journal published by the American Anthropological Association, invite prospective authors to submit proposals for a special issue to be published in December 2021. We welcome proposals focused on all topics related to the cultural, political, and ecological aspects of agriculture, food production, and the environment. We are especially interested in proposals that engage with matters of urgent intellectual, theoretical, and practical importance to the fields of agricultural and environmental anthropology, such as attempts to decolonize and/or build an anti-racist anthropology and the effects of COVID-19 on farmers and food systems. We encourage authors to engage with the work of BIPOC scholars/artists/authors and to assemble a group of special issue contributors that reflects a range of scholarly perspectives, lived experiences, academic backgrounds, and research contexts.
All proposals should consist of the following:
- a special issue title and the names and contact information for the convener or co-conveners who will serve as guest editor(s) for the issue
- guest editors curate the collection of articles and write a 2-page introduction to the special issue; in most cases, they also contribute an article to the issue
- a special issue description of around 1000-1500 words explaining the proposed topic, why this is of interest and importance, and how the authors will build on and/or unsettle previous scholarship/discourse/pedagogy in anthropology and the related social sciences and humanities
- titles, author information, and abstracts for each of the five-six papers that will make up the special issue collection
- Paper abstracts should be 250-300 words and should describe the topic of the paper, the central argument, and the analytical approach or methods used.
- Papers included in the special issue collection can be original research articles (7500 words maximum, including references) or brief research commentaries, technical reports, review essays, and grassroots profiles (3500 words with references).
For more information about CAFE visit: http://wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/cuag. More information about style and citation requirements can be found on our Author Guidelines page: https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/hub/journal/21539561/about/author-guidelines
Proposals should be submitted to the CAFE co-editors by email at cafe@americananthro.org by November 1, 2020. A decision will be made by November 15, 2020, and manuscripts will be due March 1, 2021. All manuscripts will be peer reviewed. Those accepted for publication will be published in December 2021. If you have any questions about this CFP or the submission process, contact Megan Styles & Debarati Sen (CAFE Co-Editors, cafe@americananthro.org).
Interview with Prof. Kristin Monroe, University of Kentucky
Author of “Geopolitics, Food Security, and Imaginings of the State in Qatar’s Desert Landscape”
- Can you tell us about your broader research interests and how you came to write about geopolitics, nationalism, and food in Qatar?
For much of my career, my work has focused on experiences of mobility, political insecurity, and citizenship in Beirut, Lebanon in both historical and contemporary eras. I have always been – and continue to be – concerned with the politics of space, migration, and the state. I first became interested in Qatar in 2016 when I went there to begin developing a project about the metro system being built in Doha, and I returned to live there during my sabbatical in 2017-2018 when I was a Visiting Research Scholar with the Islamic Bioethics Project at Georgetown University in Qatar. Living in Doha during the first year of the blockade was a time of geopolitical anxiety but also one of heightened nationalism. And given that this is a migrant-majority country, I was very interested in how both political rhetoric and forms of nationalism played out in various spheres of urban, everyday life and how non-citizens might or might not participate in these forms of nationalism. The research about geopolitics and food in Qatar definitely dovetails with my previous work about how practices of ecotourism serve to consolidate the nation in Lebanon because in both cases I look closely at the kinds spatial narratives, for instance about ‘the local’, that are drawn upon in nationalist sentiments.
- You use an eclectic range of sites – supermarkets, agri-expos, greenhouse tours, and so on – to make connections between food and nationalism. Can you tell our readers about the range of sites and methods you deploy in this work, and why you chose this approach?
Conducting ethnographic work in Qatar is challenging. I found this out years ago when I began research on the metro project and hit many dead ends because no one in any of the firms contracted by the state would speak with me and the state officials would only provide very limited, canned responses to my questions. In general, there is significant state surveillance and I found that undertaking ethnographic research about topics that are deemed political in any way means having to think about alternative methods – beyond the formal interview – and approaches. I found participant-observation to be a useful method for collecting data. And I did not have to go searching very far and wide for this – food politics was emergent in grocery stores, advertising, newspapers, blogs, and public forums.

Imported cows displayed at Baladna Park, an ecotourist entertainment complex near Doha. Photo by author.
- Often, ‘buy local’ is touted as a progressive and environment-friendly consumption practice. Your article shows instead that it intensifies nationalist sentiments and forges (elite) class solidarities. Significant, too, is that ‘local’ here is a state-sponsored energy-intensive, high-tech agricultural model. What implications does this model have for food security and sustainability in the context of climate change?
Thankfully, I think there are very few nations in the world with the wealth required to support the kind of energy-inefficient agriculture that is being undertaken in Qatar – but this is, of course, only a matter of degree and scale. That is, in terms of environmental degradation, the situation in Qatar appears so extreme and anomalous so as to be exceptional – anthropologists Ahmed Kanna, Amélie Le Renard, and Neha Vora have a book coming out about the exceptionalist discourses that represent the Arab Gulf region. But the Qatari situation and its aspirations to achieve the impossible – growing food in the desert and shipping from across the world in an unthinkable amount of time – causes me to reflect on my own food practices and desires and how unsustainable they are. In other words, one might look at the story I tell about Qatar and say ‘that’s horribly wasteful and problematic’. But we know that our own food system is predicated on human and environmental degradation and that our desires for abundance intersect with our fears of scarcity and sacrifice. This relates, I think, to conceptions of climate change as a social problem rather than a technical one.
- Your description of anxieties around food supply in the wake of the blockade in Qatar is eerily similar to current worries about global supply chains in the context of COVID-19. Although these are two very different contexts, what parallels do you see, and what can we learn from Qatar’s experience?
There are parallels between the two contexts in terms of fear and distress, of course, especially in terms of class dimensions. In both sites, very early anxieties – about the impact of the geopolitical conflict in the case of Qatar in 2017 and COVID-19 in the U.S. in early 2020 – were expressed in the supermarket aisles. In the U.S., especially for those of us who have been privileged enough not to go without – and have desired goods arrive at our doorstep within a matter of days or even hours – the threat of oncoming disruption of the supply chain and directives to shelter in place drove many to stockpile. A lot has been written about the toilet paper hoarding but less has been said about the kinds of foodstuffs that many in the U.S. understood as essential items for surviving life during a supply-limited pandemic: canned beans, rice, flour, yeast. Where I live these were also very difficult to locate in stores. People were purchasing staple foods with long shelf lives that they didn’t regularly buy – this tells us something about uncertainties around future availability.
In Qatar, the state stepped in almost immediately to relieve these uncertainties and assure both citizens and expatriate residents that supply chains would be quickly reconfigured. And they were – literally overnight. Qatar is a tiny, very wealthy country that operates under a very centralized state authority that has the capacity to respond effectively and rapidly in moments of crises. What we have seen in the U.S. is something altogether different. We see different approaches to state leadership across these two crises and how these approaches shaped people’s responses in a time of insecurity. In fact, amid COVID-19, citizens in many parts of the U.S. have been left alone to fight for their safety and well-being.
- What exciting new directions do you envision for research on food, agriculture, and environment in the Middle East?
An interest in urban life has dominated anthropology of the Middle East in recent decades. It is interesting how this focus on the urban (developed in part as a counterpoint to the Orientalizing tropes of the 20th century that represented people in the region as ‘out of time’ or ‘stuck in tradition’) entailed a move away from research on rurality. The region has seen the same trends in urbanization as the rest of the world but the reality is, to quote Tania Li, that its “agricultural story is not over.” Reflecting broader trends in cultural anthropology, I think we are seeing political ecology approaches as well as studies of infrastructure (in relation to the natural environment) emerging in studies of the region. Often this work examines the links between the rural and the urban as well as urbanization and environmental change. There is ample room for critical food studies, however. I would love to see food given more attention, including through work that engages a bio-cultural framework.
Culture, Agriculture, Food, & Environment (CAFE) Special Issue 42(2), December 2020
UPDATED Deadline: April 15, 2020
Guest Co-Editor: Teresa Mares (University of Vermont)
CAFE Co-Editors: Megan Styles (University of Illinois Springfield) & Debarati Sen (Kennesaw State University)
In this special issue of CAFE, we investigate the ways that contemporary immigration policies, practices, debates, and discourses influence the lives, perspectives, and practices of farmers and food producers in the United States. We invite papers based on original ethnographic research in any location where those who invest their labor in food and farming have been affected by emergent immigration debates and policies, especially those embraced by the US Labor Department under President Trump. We define “farmers and food producers” in this issue as anyone who contributes their labor (physical and/or intellectual) to the cultivation, harvest, processing, distribution, or marketing of agricultural goods. Papers might investigate:
- the ways that farmers and farm workers frame their personal stake in contemporary immigration debates and policies;
- the roles played by farmers and farm workers in immigration activism and policy organizing;
- the ways that farmer livelihood and well-being are tied to immigration policies and debates at any scale (local, regional, national, international);
- forms of violence experienced by immigrant and/or minority farm workers as a result of contemporary immigration policies and debates;
- the ways in which race, class, gender, ethnicity, etc., intersect with changing immigration discourse and policy to impact farming, related activisms, and farm-worker well-being;
- conflicts among or within farming communities caused by or linked to changing immigration discourses and policies;
- inequalities, instabilities, and insecurities associated with changing immigration discourses and policies;
- the social, economic, political, and ecological effects of changing immigration policies;
- the historical or legal context surrounding immigration, labor, and agriculture in the United States;
- how immigration issues, policies and discourses affect specific agricultural sectors in the US (e.g. organic vegetable growers, hemp producers, dairy farmers, etc.)
- the ways that farmers and farming communities outside the United States are affected by changing US immigration policies and discourses (e.g. the H2-A visa program)
We invite submissions based on original research framed within the literature in anthropology and related disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. Submissions should offer clear theoretical interventions, methodological approaches, and scholarly arguments. However, we also encourage authors to consider making policy recommendations and to clearly articulate the applied aspects of their work. Manuscripts should not exceed 6500 words (including references).
Culture, Agriculture, Food, and Environment (CAFE) is a peer-reviewed journal published by the American Anthropological Association. For more information about the journal or to browse our current and back issues visit: http://wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/cuag. More information about style and citation requirements can be found on our Author Guidelines page: https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/hub/journal/21539561/about/author-guidelines Manuscripts can be submitted using our ScholarOne online submission portal: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/americananthro-cafe.
To be included in the December 2020 special issue, manuscripts must be received by April 1, 2020. If you have any questions about this CFP or the submission process, please contact Teresa Mares (Guest Co-Editor, teresa.mares@uvm.edu) or Megan Styles & Debarati Sen (CAFE Co-Editors, cafe@americananthro.org).
Special Issue: The Conservation of Plant Genetic Resources
“The articles in this issue examine the strategies that farmers, scientists, and citizens use to “save” the things that matter to us (our seeds, our bodies, our farms, and our communities) in the midst of accelerating, human-induced environmental degradation. They investigate the ways that these actors imagine the future—the ways that they seek to preserve what they see as vital, prevent what they see as unacceptable, and (some-times) give in to what they see as unavoidable. The authors meticulously document the care that these actors invest in saving seeds, cultivating gardens, ensuring farm success, and documenting the information necessary for these things to be sustained (or resurrected) in an uncertain future.”
Introduction
“Saving” Plant Genetic Resources (& Ourselves) in a Time of Accelerating Ecological Change
// Megan Styles and Brandi Janssen
Special Issue Articles
Guest Editor: Helen Anne Curry
Introduction: The Collection and Conservation of Plant Genetic Resources, Past and Present
//Helen Anne Curry
Gene Banks, Seed Libraries, and Vegetable Sanctuaries: The Cultivation and Conservation of Heritage Vegetables in Britain, 1970–1985
//Helen Anne Curry
Creative Practices of Care: The Subjectivity, Agency, and Affective Labor of Preparing Seeds for Long‐term Banking
//Xan Sarah Chacko
“The First Step Is to Bring It Into Our Hands:” Wild Seed Conservation, the Stewardship of Species Survival, and Gardening the Anthropocene at the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership
//Kay E. Lewis‐Jones
Research Articles
The Place of Bitter Cassava in the Social Organization and Belief Systems of Two Indigenous Peoples of Guyana
//Janette Bulkan
Beyond Alternative Food Networks: Understanding Motivations to Participate in Orti Urbaniin Palermo
//Giuseppina Migliore, Pietro Romeo, Riccardo Testa, and Giorgio Schifani
Is the Emergence of the “Fresh Prep” Food Service Provider an Entrée into Local Foods?
//Thomas L. Henshaw
“Profitability” vs. “Making It:” Causes and Consequences of Disembedding Beginning Farms’ Finances
//Andrea Rissing
Special Issue: Agriculture of the Middle
This special issue of CAFE draws on regular conversations between the authors over the course of several years about the need for greater theoretical and ethnographic attention to an area of agriculture and food systems increasingly called “Agriculture of the Middle.”
Introduction
Navigating the Middle Ground: Anthropological Investigations of Agricultural Practice and Scale
// Brandi Janssen and Megan Styles
Special Issue Articles – Guest Editors: Ashley Stinnett and Jennifer Jo Thompson
An Introduction: Ethnographic Accounts of “The Middle” in Anthropological Studies of (Agri)Culture
//Ashley Stinnett and Jennifer Jo Thompson
Confronting the Goldilocks Problem: Encountering “The Middle” in Anthropological Studies of Food and Agriculture
//Jennifer Jo Thompson and Ashley Stinnett
Alongside the Grain: Conceptualizing Scale and the Upper Threshold of Local in the Agro‐industrial Palouse
// Troy M. Wilson
Small Farms, Big Plans: Mechanization and Specialization as Measures of “The Middle”
// Brandi Janssen
Meeting in the Middle: Scaling‐up and Scaling‐over in Alternative Food Networks
// Lilian Brislen
Mission‐Driven Intermediaries as Anchors of the Middle Ground in the American Food System: Evidence from Warrenton, NC
// Meenu Tewari, Sophie Kelmenson, Andrew Guinn, Gabriel Cumming, Rudolph Colloredo‐Mansfeld
Special Issue Reports and Commentaries
An Extension Specialist’s Reflections from the Field: Discovering Ag of the Middle in the Shift from Direct Sale to Wholesale Vegetable Production
// Jennifer Jo Thompson and Julia Gaskin
New Inquiries into the Agri‐Cultures of the Middle
// Kathryn De Master
Book Review
Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States
// James R. Veteto
Introduction
Agriculture, Anxiety, and Amazonification: Creative Adaptation and Resistance in Risky Rural and Urban Landscapes
// Brandi Janssen and Megan Styles
Research Articles
Urban Expansion, Agrarian Shifts, and Decentralized Governance in Thailand’s Isaan Region
//Gregory Gullette, Sayamon Singto
The Advantage of Natural Farming as an Eco‐Friendly Way of Living: Practice and Discourse on the “Learners’ Fields” in Fukuoka, Japan
//Kaoru Fukuda
Agricultural Implications of Unconventional Natural Gas Development: Divergent Perceptions of Sustainable and Conventional Farmers
// Melissa N. Poulsen, Lisa Bailey‐Davis, Joseph DeWalle, Jacob Mowery, Brian S. Schwartz
Coffee Landscapes: Specialty Coffee, Terroir, and Traceability in Costa Rica
// Julia Smith
Offsetting Risk: Organic Food, Pollution, and the Transgression of Spatial Boundaries
// Giovanni Orlando
The Case for Local and Sustainable Seafood: A Georgia Example
// Jennifer Sweeney Tookes Peggy Barlett Tracy Yandle
Research Report
“It’s the Amazon World”: Small‐Scale Farmers on an Entrepreneurial Treadmill
// Emily McKee
Agriculture, Anxiety, and Amazonification
The articles in this issue of CAFE investigate how farmers and eaters conceive of and manage the many forms of “risk” and “anxiety” posed by urban and industrial development and the “Amazonification” of the global economy. To sustain rural livelihoods and safeguard their physical well‐being, they blend practices and beliefs that sometimes appear contradictory. The contributors to this issue explore the many ways that farmers and eaters perceive risks, define and seek to solve problems, and develop the knowledge necessary to clear new pathways for rural livelihoods and urban development.
Introduction
Agriculture, Anxiety, and Amazonification: Creative Adaptation and Resistance in Risky Rural and Urban Landscapes
// Brandi Janssen and Megan Styles
Articles
Urban Expansion, Agrarian Shifts, and Decentralized Governance in Thailand’s Isaan Region
// Gregory Gullette and Sayamon Singto
The Advantage of Natural Farming as an Eco‐Friendly Way of Living: Practice and Discourse on the “Learners’ Fields” in Fukuoka, Japan
// Kaoru Fukuda
Agricultural Implications of Unconventional Natural Gas Development: Divergent Perceptions of Sustainable and Conventional Farmers
// Melissa N. Poulsen, Lisa Bailey‐Davis, Joseph DeWalle, Jacob Mowery, and Brian S. Schwartz
Coffee Landscapes: Specialty Coffee, Terroir, and Traceability in Costa Rica
// Julia Smith
Offsetting Risk: Organic Food, Pollution, and the Transgression of Spatial Boundaries
// Giovanni Orlando
The Case for Local and Sustainable Seafood: A Georgia Example
// Jennifer Sweeney Tookes, Peggy Barlett, and Tracy Yandle
Research Reports
“It’s the Amazon World”: Small‐Scale Farmers on an Entrepreneurial Treadmill
// Emily McKee
Actor Networks, Celebrity Farmers, Identity Performance, and Super Star Crops
Anthropologists are well aware of the blurred boundaries between what is local and global and the complex ways that identity, performance, knowledge, and practice intersect to inform both angles of view. These relationships are particularly evident in networks and systems of agriculture and food production. This issue of CAFE considers how locals respond to, are affected by, and empower themselves in relation to global markets and international development initiatives through their identities, relationships with the plants they cultivate, and the realities of climate change, labor needs, and social and economic inequality.
Introduction
Actor Networks, Celebrity Farmers, Identity Performance, and Super Star Crops
// Brandi Janssen and Stephanie Paladino
Articles
The Journey of an Ancestral Seed: The Case of the Lupino Paisano Food Network in Cotopaxi, Ecuador
//Alexandra Martínez‐Flores, Guido Ruivenkamp and Joost Jongerden
Race, Status, and Biodiversity: The Social Climbing of Quinoa
// Deborah Andrews
“Show Farmers”: Transformation and Performance in Telangana, India
// Andrew Flachs
Losing Labor: Coffee, Migration, and Economic Change in Veracruz, Mexico
// David Griffith, Patricia Zamudio Grave, Rosalba Cortés Viveros, Jerónimo Cabrera Cabrera
The Fate of an Old Water System in the New Era of Climate Change and Market Imperatives in Southwest China
// Ann Maxwell Hill and Kelin Zhuang
Research Reports
A Typology for Investigating the Effects of Sturgeon Aquaculture on Conservation Goals
// Richard Apostle
The Story of Tapyo: The Alkaline Salt Substitute of the Apatanis of Arunachal Pradesh, India
// Rashmirekha Sarma
Book Reviews
Aesop’s Anthropology: A Multispecies Approach
// Reviewed by Deborah Andrews
Cultural Heritage and the Challenge of Sustainability
// Reviewed by Murray J. Leaf
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cuag.12085/full
DOI: 10.1111/cuag.12085
by Andrew Flachs
In this article, I describe a paradoxical but necessary creation of the development apparatus: the “show farmer” (Stone 2014). Various corporate, state, and NGO development projects call upon show farmers to demonstrate the viability of alternative agriculture for visiting funders, scientists, media, and growers. As village gatekeepers, show farmers cultivate local celebrity and publicize a model not just for their community but for the sustainability of agricultural development interventions in the global South generally. This transformation is, however, contingent—when the incentives, ranging from farming infrastructure to social recognition, dry up, show farmers may abandon the stage and development interventions can fail. In addition to qualitative ethnography and interviews, this article draws on 12 months of seed choice and household demographic surveys conducted 2012–2014 among 104 organic cotton farmers in the Warangal and Asifabad districts of Telangana, India. To better understand how alternative agriculture interventions are affecting rural life and how farmers create new avenues for agricultural success through the development apparatus, anthropologists must pay more attention to this crucial but underexplored character.