ChinaComx PhD candidate Astrid Y. Xiao will head to Venice this November to share her research at the international conference Eating Indoors and Outdoors in Children’s Literature. Hosted by Ca’ Foscari University on 27–28 November 2025, the event explores how food and eating spaces appear in children’s stories across cultures.

Astrid will speak in the panel “Knowing Your Onions: Foraging Spaces” (16:15–17:45) on 28 November, chaired by Carolina C. Granini. Her presentation, titled “Edible Lessons: Moral Topographies of Food in Chinese Children’s Comics”, examines how food and eating spaces were depicted in lianhuanhua during Mao-era China. Through close readings of images and narratives of intimate spots in the vineyard and outdoor spaces for communal picnics, her talk explores how everyday food practices became tools for political pedagogy. She argues that these small, ordinary moments around meals were mobilized to cultivate socialist virtues such as collectivism and disciplined desire. In tracing these “edible moral landscapes,” the presentation shows how children’s visual culture shaped not only notions of nourishment but also broader ideas of morality and ideological belonging.