SIEF Food Research 2026 – SIEF 25th International Ethnological Food Research Conference

SIEF Food Research 2026

SIEF 25th International Ethnological Food Research Conference

ZRC SAZU, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 15–18 September 2026

The dinner table is a daily point of convergence – a site of routine practice, yet also a setting for some of our most meaningful interactions with close companions. Food plays a role in a wide range of social interactions—whether with app-based food couriers or through shared meals with spouses, whether in practical terms or as expressions of our values and beliefs. When closely examined, these food-related encounters offer a window into broader questions of sociability, economy, multiculturalism, politics, migration, heritagisation, and the questions on the Anthropocene.

The goal of the 25th Conference of the SIEF Food Research Group, “Food Encounters: Emplacement and Ethics in Everyday Life”, is to shed light on two types of food encounters:

Commensal spaces show how food can foster conviviality and bridge class and cultural divides, particularly in urban settings. The growing concept of conviviality emphasises everyday, place-based interactions through which people from diverse backgrounds find common ground. Restaurants, bars, bakeries, farmers’ markets, and even doorsteps are everyday spaces where these interactions take place.
Food is more than sustenance; it is a site of ideological negotiation that reflects tensions between tradition and change, identity and aspiration, and consumption and sustainability. Food-related choices are shaped by debates over dietary ethics, heritage, branding, and sustainable practices, influencing place-making, identity-building, diplomacy, and social change. The conference will also explore historical and contemporary perspectives that show how the politics of food operate across time and place.

The 25th SIEF Conference will take place between 15th and 18th September 2026 at the ZRC SAZU premises in Ljubljana, Slovenia. English will be the working language of the conference, and will take place entirely in person. All questions can be sent to sief-food2026@zrc-sazu.si.

Keynote Speakers

Raúl Matta

Raúl Matta is a full researcher at the Institute Lyfe Research and Innovation Center and research associate at the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD), both in France. Previously he has worked at the Freie Universität Berlin, the IRD, and the University of Göttingen. Between 2021 and 2022, he was a Marie Skłodowska Curie/FIAS Fellow at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study. His work lies at the intersection of anthropology, food, and heritage studies, examining how diverse actors ascribe multiple meanings and purposes to food. Raul has conducted fieldwork in Peru, Mexico, Germany, and France and held leading positions in several international research projects, most recently the EC Horizon–funded CONVIVIUM. He is the author of From the Plate to Gastro-Politics (Palgrave, 2023) and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Food and Cultural Heritage (2025)

His plenary talk is titled Shaping Inclusive Foodscapes through Convivial Activations

Maja Godina Golija

Maja Godina Golija is a Scientific Councillor at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU) and Full Professor of Ethnology at the University of Maribor. She is the author of several books and numerous scholarly articles on Slovenian food culture, the economy, urban life, and everyday life. She has participated in numerous research projects concerning the everyday life of Slovenians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the cultural heritage of Slovenia. From 2003 to 2010, she served as a member of the Presidency of the International Commission for Research into European Food History (ICREFH), and from 2016 to 2023, she was Vice-President of the Food Research Working Group of the Société Internationale d’Ethnologie et de Folklore (SIEF).

Her plenary talk is titled The Slovenian Dining Table – A Space of Encounter, Acquaintance, and Social Interaction.

James Farrer

James Farrer is Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at Sophia University in Tokyo. He has conducted ethnographic studies of sexuality, nightlife, expatriate communities, and urban food cultures in China and Japan. He is a frequent contributor to media programming on urban life in Asia, including NHK World’s “Dive in Tokyo.” His recent publications include The Global Japanese Restaurant: Mobilities, Imaginaries and Politics (with David Wank), Globalization and Asian Cuisines: Transnational Networks and Contact Zones, and Shanghai Nightscapes: A Nocturnal Biography of a Global City (with Andrew Field). Currently, he is conducting comparative research on migrant-run restaurants in Japan and Germany.

His plenary talk is titled Rethinking the Urban Third Place in the Age of Migration: Urban Eateries as Places of Care and Conviviality.

Shaping Inclusive Foodscapes through Convivial Activations

In this talk, I argue that cultural, artistic, and civic action are crucial for addressing our current disconnection from the food system. Expanded understandings of foodscapes and conviviality are helpful to operate a shift where food is no longer approached primarily as an edible object, a commodity, or as a lifestyle choice, but as a social and environmental relation shaped through a multiplicity of encounters. Foodscapes –the lived and imagined landscapes where the material, symbolic, experiential, and discursive dimensions of food intersect, intertwine, and co-evolve– make the encounter possibilities visible in a concrete register, rooted in the real world. Conviviality is understood here as the art of making room for humans and non-humans, for new stories and trajectories. This presentation explores how convivial activations –situated and intentional interventions within the realm of food and culture– can foster inclusion through practices of sharing, recognition, and mutual learning, while remaining fragile, unequal, and vulnerable to commodification and political capture.

The Slovenian Dining Table – A Space of Encounter, Acquaintance, and Social Interaction.

Food consumption is an important social practice that shapes the lives of individuals and communities across diverse social environments. Food serves as a bridge that connects people and diminishes cultural, social, and gender differences, while also functioning as a marker of distinction and separation.

The shared consumption of meals, together with its widespread popularity and prevalence, was already recognised in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts of Slovenian life as an important element of social life and conviviality. Their authors frequently highlighted the pronounced hospitality of the Slovenians and the lavishness of festive meal preparation, even in contexts characterised by limited resources. This practice has persisted to the present day and represents a form of conspicuous consumption and social positioning.

Meals and food have long played a significant role in Slovenian social life, particularly when consumed outside the home. Inns, taverns, and restaurants were not merely spaces of sociability, but also places where new dishes, flavours, and cultural practices, values, and beliefs were encountered. These venues helped shape contemporary Slovenian cuisine through the introduction of new ingredients and food practices.

This talk examines the principal characteristics of the Slovenian dining table, with particular emphasis on its role in the formation and consolidation of communities. Particular attention is given to shared meals around the inn table from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s, when dietary patterns characteristic of the contemporary Slovenian cultural sphere began to take shape.

Rethinking the Urban Third Place in the Age of Migration: Urban Eateries as Places of Care and Conviviality

For four decades, Ray Oldenburg’s “third place” — informal public spaces beyond home and work — has shaped how scholars imagine urban conviviality. Yet the concept was theorized in mid-twentieth-century North America, where neighborhood sociability was assumed to flow among culturally similar locals. Even then, it was colored by nostalgia for venues Oldenburg saw as disappearing in the television age. What becomes of the third place in the dense, mobile, multi-ethnic neighborhoods of contemporary cities, where migration reshapes who cooks, who serves, and who belongs at the table?

Drawing on more than a decade of public ethnography in Nishi-Ogikubo, a Tokyo neighborhood with an unusually thick ecosystem of small independent eateries, this talk reframes the urban third place as an infrastructure of care. I argue that small restaurants, bars, and cafés do more than host conviviality; they actively produce it through everyday acts of attention, hospitality, and craft. Owners and regulars together cultivate what I call “craft as care” — gendered, embodied labor that knits diverse strangers into provisional communities. This care work becomes especially visible, and especially fragile, at the seams where migration meets locality. The question is one of how far care and conviviality can extend to newcomers, and what additional forms of emotional labor are required, both of owners and other patrons.

Drawing also on a comparative project tracing migrant restaurateurs across Asian and European cities, alongside fieldwork observations from other urban sites, I show how migrant-run eateries simultaneously extend and complicate the third-place ideal: offering refuge and recognition for newcomers while testing the elasticity of neighborhood belonging. Bringing these cases into conversation, I propose that the urban third place be reconceptualized not as Oldenburg conceived it as a stable container of conviviality and local identity, but rather as an ongoing social achievement — relational, embodied, and laboriously maintained.