The Oriental Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with the KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, invites scholars with a solid fieldwork background, primarily in the Indo-Pacific but not limited to it, to present research on contemporary issues in food, nourishment, and extractivism. The extractive imperative (Jacka 2018: 22), stemming from the necessity of self-consuming capitalist growth, has increasingly devoured nourishing ecologies (forests, rivers, swamps, coastal areas, mountains, lakes, and small islands, etc.) and transformed them into mining concessions, plantation zones, and large-scale agricultural production, which, ironically, are often justified by the global narrative of energy transition, food insecurity, and climate change mitigation. These ecologies are living social arenas that convey emotion, memory, feeling, and empathy, and encompass a range of practices, interactions, skills, and affects that together reanimate human and more-than-human relations and sustain the intricate web of life. The depletion of nourishing ecologies and the insatiable appetite of capitalist extraction prompt scholars to rethink food, nourishment, and extractivism as “metabolic (in)justice” (Chao 2023; 2025: 167), a process that intricately links individual physical health, cultural wellbeing, ecologies, and multiscalar but uneven power relations. The lens of metabolic justice attends to how nourishment is still primarily constituted by multispecies relations and more-than-human interdependency, but is increasingly shaped by the legacy of colonialism, capitalist frontiers, and the global food system.
A major concern of the workshop is to reflect on how social, cultural, and nutritional aspects of nourishment (identity, multispecies relations, value, kinship, beliefs, politics, history, and technologies) are shaped, constituted, and transformed by extractive activities. Possible research questions include, but are not limited to, what nourishing practices across sites, scales, species, and subjects embody metabolic justice? How do extractive activities generate metabolic (in)justice in the human body, landscape, and society? How do people creatively resist metabolic (in)justice and rework nourishing practices? How do people reimagine a nourishing future in extractive zones? The workshop also asks possible questions on methodology: What challenges do researchers encounter when they experience the transformation of a nourishment site and practice? What is the limit of ethnographic methods in addressing and telling metabolic (in)justice?
How to Apply
To participate in this on-site workshop, please send an abstract of 300 words and a short biographical sketch to darmanto@orient.cas.cz
The selected participants are encouraged to prepare a longer draft of papers (approximately 3,000-5,000 words) in early October 2026. The drafts will be circulated among the participants to facilitate a more in-depth discussion and potentially be followed up for an edited volume or special issue in a journal.
Important Dates
Abstract Deadline: July 31, 2026.
Acceptance: August 31, 2026
Draft Paper: October 10, 2026
Workshop: October 20-23, 2026
Support
This workshop is part of the project Beyond Insecurity: Changing Indigenous People's Foodways in Time of Climate Change in Indonesia (BICOFID) funded by The
Czech Science Foundation (GAČR) (https://beyondinsecurity.net). Selected participants will receive full or partial support (travel, accommodation, meals, and workshop materials). Please indicate whether you will need financial support to participate in the workshop. Priority will be given to junior colleagues and scholars in precarious working arrangements.
Workshop-Food-Nourishment-and Metabolic Justice in the extractive Frontiers-OU and KITLV.pdf
