Roadsides Special Issue
“Foodways”

Join us to celebrate the launch of this much anticipated project

December 2, 2025 | 10AM PST

About the issue: The movement of foods as commodities and cultural artefacts rests on infrastructure as a form of engagement, care, and as an ongoing process. In this issue of Roadsides, we think through such cosmologies alongside the infrastructure that moves food around the world and ask: how do foodways and their socio-cultural-cosmological scaffoldings condition each other?

In considering these questions, co-editors Matthäus Rest and Dolly Kikon have curated a beautiful and diverse collection of essays and photo-essays that offer different ways to understand infrastructure through a compellingly wide aperture inclusive of community, kinship, memories, social connections, and things like pesticides, Indigenous rice varieties, and community cookbooks. Thus, infrastructure can be understood as a form of engagement, care, and as an ongoing process. In this light, these contributions address the linkage of local foods with global flows, the logistics of eating, how the state and borders change food, how food makes and shapes communities, and how growing food interacts with questions of autonomy and dependence. 

This expansive view of infrastructure resonates deeply with this year’s CSAS theme, “Food, Justice, and Community.” Beyond Dolly Kikon’s role as guest editor, CSAS is grateful for the efforts of many members of the extended CSAS community shaping this volume. 

• CSAS affiliate, Sanjay Barbora, and CSAS collaborators, Omer Aijazi, and Bengt Karlsson served as reviewers
• UCSC PhD Candidate in Anthropology, Inditian Latifa, has an essay, “Brave Rice,” in the volume, which attends to memories of lost marsh rice varieties (padè paja) in Aceh, Indonesia, to broaden how we think about hydraulic infrastructure in landscapes shaped by incomplete agricultural waterworks.
• The special issue has three key essays from South Asia on food, community, and infrastructure. Uttam Lal and Mirza Zulfiqur Rahman’s essay on Chhurpi examines how communities navigate food security and development in the Himalayan region. Fizza Batool’s ethnography on the empty granary of Ishkoman highlights the ongoing agrarian transformation in the Gilgit-Baltistan region, and Meghal Perara’s essay on the fish trade and cold-chain in Sri Lanka focuses on conceptions of freshness and quality.

About the Journal: Roadsides is a scholar-led, collectively managed platinum Open Access journal designated to be a forum devoted to exploring the social, cultural and political life of infrastructure. The title can be understood as a metaphorical proxy for all sorts of engagements arising alongside roads, rail tracks, pipelines, border fences, airports, houses, dams, and other kinds of infrastructure as they are imagined, contested, constructed, and maintained, and as they fall into disrepair. The journal offers space for reflection, for engaging in conversation with others, and a place to test new ideas before developing them into full-length articles and books