Workshop

The Food Laws We Inherit: A Workshop on Relational Models to Nature 

Friday, November 13th, 2026

1:30pm-3:00pm

Room W305

How we relate to nature shapes how we govern it. Human-nature interactions have been organized into a finite set of “relational models”—cognitive frameworks that condition how individuals and societies perceive, value, and act toward the natural world (Muradian and Pascual, 2018). Each model carries its own grammar and produces a distinct language of valuation that is intrenched in and frames law and policy.

Food and environmental law in Canada thus inherit and reproduce particular relational models, often without naming them. Statutes like Ontario’s Drainage Act, for instance, encode a particular way of valuing land that has changed little since the 1880s. If we do not think explicitly about how our relationships with nature guide our laws and policies or about which relationships with nature actually show up in those laws and policies, then those relationships are reiterated generation after generation without thought or intention. The frameworks chosen by earlier generations govern us now, and they constrain what future generations of practitioners, communities, and ecosystems can become.

This workshop invites participants to make these underlying frameworks visible and deliberate. After a short introduction to the relational models approach with an example of its application to the Drainage Act, participants will work first individually, then in small groups, to identify the relational models embedded in their own scholarship, practice, and lived relationships with land and food systems. A facilitated full-group discussion will then interrogate whether the elementary typology adequately captures the Canadian food law context, or whether new or refined relational models emerge inductively from the room. The workshop’s output is a participant-generated map of relational models, offered as a resource for the next generation of food law.

Convenors:

Terra Duchene, University of Windsor Faculty of Law

Ali Mokdad, Centre for Cities, University of Windsor Faculty of Law