The 2026 conference theme is drawn from the UC Humanities Research Center’s programming initiative on “sustenance.”

• When preparing your proposal, reflect on the following to help develop your engagement with the theme: How does a focus on sustenance constitute different ways of knowing and being in the world, including Black, queer, and feminist autonomous community projects, Indigenous stewardship, climate/environmental justice, and the many forms of caregiving and kinkeeping performed by displaced, occupied, and marginalized communities around the world?
• How have different communities and economies of sustenance shaped the state of California? From the enormous agricultural industry to the innovations of “California cuisine” with its integration—and gentrification—of food cultures far and wide, sustenance has been a central aspect of our state and its history.
• How is sustenance indispensable in biological, social, cultural, and psychological terms? What other kinds of sustenance could and should figure in our thinking and imaginations? What are the cultural, social, and political implications of pursuing sustenance?
• How does sustenance, in its many forms, become sustainable? How do current environmental circumstances intensify the links between sustenance and sustainability? How does sustenance illuminate the environmental challenges facing local, state, and global communities?
• How is sustenance allocated? How does access to sustenance work, or not, and in whose interests? With what relevant histories of struggle? And with what sometimes tragic outcomes, including famine, food insecurity, and chronic disease?
• How does a humanistic, artistic, or qualitative social scientific approach to sustenance illuminate or critically challenge conventional understandings of foodways?
• How might sustenance cut across different historical periods, styles, scales, constituencies, and temporalities? How might it become an axis and/or register of our perspectives on the world?
• What are the current and/or historical connections between food, art, politics, and media aesthetics?
• What kind of sustenance will the university and education in general require in these challenging times?

*see UCHRI’s Sustenance initiative for more inspiration

For questions or more information: Katharine.Henshaw@ucr.edu

Hosted by the UCR Center for Ideas and Society and supported by a grant from the UC Humanities Network and the UC Office of the President.