Thursday, March 6, 2025 – Saturday, March 8, 2025
Rethinking Place Third Annual Conference
Food & Memory is the third and final conference hosted by Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck. It aims to explore food systems, agricultural practices, and culinary histories as a point of entry into place-making, past, present, and future.
The conference brings together agricultural workers, chefs, food systems scholars, and artists to create fertile ground for interdisciplinary discussion. Situated on the banks of the Mahicantuck (Hudson River) at a time when current food systems, planetary health, and political and environmental instability pose existential threats to the sovereignty and wellbeing of human and non-human kin alike, Rethinking Place aims to center a diverse range of voices and histories that have touched and formed the current agricultural region in which Bard College is located.
The two prior Rethinking Place conferences, focused on emergent and disruptive archives and on Indigenous research methods, engaged themes that continue to apply to Food & Memory. Our complex food systems and their many human and non-human players – recipes and seeds, plants and care – can be seen as living archives, locations of research, and sites of knowledge production. Rethinking Place now hosts a multidisciplinary gathering to directly interrogate questions of food and memory, building on twenty-four months of work in adjacent areas. We are pleased to join our efforts in place-based inquiry with other entities on the Bard campus. For their support over the life of the Rethinking Place project, we thank the Bard Farm, the Center for Environmental Science and Humanities, the Center for Human Rights, and the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts.
Thursday, March 6th
Opening Keynote and Annual Electa Quinney Lecture ” In the Kitchen with Our Ancestors” from Lucille Grignon from Ancient Roots Homestead
Sewing Circle with Marie Watt
Food & Memory Exhibition Opening and Reception
Chop Chop Book Launch with BEM Bookstore
Friday, March 7th
“Taste the Revolution: The Evolution of Bengali Food Culture” Lecture
“Land & Memory: Research Protocols and Investigations” Talk
Rethinking Place Student Fellows Workshops
“Grow Food Not Prisons” with Jalal Sabur
Medicine Walk with Misty Cook
Zine Workshop
Jam Making Session at Montgomery Place Farm
Saturday, March 8th
Closing Keynote with Kenny Perkins of Akwesasne Seed Hub
“Building Land-based Solidarity Networks” Talk
Student Organizing for Food Justice Workshop
Palestine Heirloom Seed Library Traveling Kitchen Event