Food Encounters: Emplacement and Ethics in Everyday Life
From 15 to 18 September 2026, the Institute of Slovenian Ethnology at ZRC SAZU hosted the 25th conference of the Food Research Working Group of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF). The conference was organised in collaboration with the research programmes Ethnological, Anthropological and Folklore Studies Research on Everyday Life and Heritage on the Margins: New Perspectives on Heritage and Identity Within and Beyond National, and the research project Migrants’ Emplacement at the Micro-level: Restaurants as the Contact Zones. The conference explored food as a site of encounter, emplacement, and ethnic and ideological negotiation in everyday life. Its forty presentations and three keynote lectures approached the study of social relations through the lens of food.
Four members of the Heritage on the Margins research group presented their work at the conference. All four are also involved in the project Migrants’ Emplacement at the Micro-level: Restaurants as the Contact Zones.
Martina Bofulin, who also served on the conference’s scientific committee, compared the rise of Western cuisine in China’s metropolitan centres with its emergence in smaller rural communities in the hinterlands of coastal cities. In these communities, its emergence is also linked to the heritagisation of emigration legacies.
Špela Ledinek Lozej, who also served on the programme committee, explored the intersections between global heritage initiatives and local food practices, drawing on the example of Neapolitan pizzerias in Slovenia.
Nataša Rogelja Caf presented her walking ethnography of Trubarjeva Street in Ljubljana, focusing on the hybrid character of social encounters in its many “ethnic” restaurants.
Eva Fekonja presented findings from research she conducted among Afghan refugees in an Albanian town as part of her master’s degree. Her presentation focused on two makeshift Afghan restaurants, contrasting them with the food regime at the refugees’ accommodation.
