Teresa Davis (University of Sydney) 

From Little India to Modern Australian Fusion: De-Ghettoization or appropriation of migrant food traditions

Abstract. The economic disparity and the cultural minimimization of the Indian cuisine in Australia began in the 1880s when it arrived with the ‘Ghan’(Afghan/Indian) cameleers and the Sikhs. It followed the trajectory of homogenization and oversimplification, fitted and shaped to the Western imaginary. It remained the ‘cheap’ takeaway cuisine, spatially confined to the ‘international food’ aisle in the supermarkets and within the ‘Little India’ urban ghettos, a delegation low within the ‘culinary hierarchy’ ( Krishnendu Ray 2016) of cuisines classifying it as an ethnic rather than amongst the haute cuisines of the European continent. A form of the food colonialism ( Lisa Heldke 2012) operates in the spatial segregation of the social hierarchy of food taste, while emphasising and need for confinement rationalised as preserving ‘authenticity’ and a purist perspective. More recently the cultural appropriation of the cuisine and adaptation into the ‘modern Australian’ cuisine of the urban elite haute eateries, where the Indian has been subsumed by the ‘Australian’ with hints of authentic spicing and the purist garnish of a curry leaf. This reimagined consumption of the ethnic releases the Indian cuisine from the segregation of the ghettoized Little India into the wider urban food spaces, but at cost of losing its identity?

Emma Willoughby (National University of Singapore)

The Politics of "Wet Markets": Theory and Evidence from Vietnam

Abstract. In 2003, SARS-Cov-1 emerged from Guangdong, China from a place known as a “wet market.” In 2020, SARS-Cov-2 emerged from Wuhan, China from another place known as a “wet market.” Despite this trend, no research has examined the social and political contexts of these places called “wet markets.” Publicly-funded markets remain a facet of life for many in Southeast Asia, and remain and important topic for public health. However, why and how governments differ in their regulatory approaches to markets and small-scale traders remains undertheorized. In this presentation I develop a theoretical model of marketplace governance. Comparing findings from global health actors with various regimes across time within the context of Vietnam, I propose that delineating between concepts of place-based and people-based governance strategies helps us understand the variation of governance towards markets that can be found between regimes. The theory offers a framework for understanding not only the politics of markets, but also broader topics related to the study of urban governance, including housing, infrastructure, and social policies. Isabelle Antunès (Independent Scholar) Reading the Next Economy. What Cameroon's Markets Already Know Abstract. At a wet market stall in Cameroon, palm grub larvae sit beside tomatoes and cassava. Documented decades ago in one of the country's earliest comprehensive culinary references, it never entered Cameroon's development priorities. Yet it never left the market. This paper asks what that persistence means. Markets are usually understood through exchange. This paper reads them differently — as places where knowledge continues to circulate after it has faded from policy agendas and scientific priorities. Cameroon makes the case unusually well: it is CEMAC's largest food exporter, supplying 88% of the sub-region's agricultural export value, and holds one of Africa's richest reservoirs of biological and culinary diversity — yet ranks 78th of 123 countries on the 2025 Global Hunger Index. Drawing on research for the Gourmand Award-winning Flavours of Influence: The Rise of Cameroon as a Food Power, this paper reads development policy, early culinary documentation, biodiversity research, trade statistics and wet-market observation together, revealing patterns none could show alone. Cuisine reveals what a society has learned to value. Markets reveal what continues to circulate beyond prevailing scientific, policy and investment priorities. Recognition, the paper argues, is not simply noticing — it is the moment a society begins asking different questions of what it already has. Markets are where it can begin to recognise the economy it has not yet decided to build.