MSc Thesis opportunity Community Supported Food Systems in Istanbul

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Istanbul is a vibrant city with a flourishing alternative food economy. These include manifold neighbourhood markets, consumer cooperatives, farmers’ markets, allotment gardens, communal kitchens etc.. Some of these food initiatives mimic or resemble ‘village food’, partly capitalizing on nostalgia, but also relating to long time practices in which urban migrants were provided with food products by relatives in their home-village. Others are driven by the desire to develop alternative relations around food. This research project aims to map and understand the social relations and values from which these food initiatives emerged and developed, and their role in food provisioning to an urban population. The researcher will do independent research, but support is provided by two Istanbul researchers with an interest in food studies and an extensive network.

 

 

Interested? Contact joost.jongerden@wur.nl

MSc Thesis opportunity: Food Forests – the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve ‘Os Ancares’

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Galicia is well-known for its green inlands, its landscape consisting of a patchwork of forests, pastures, and small meandering streams and rivers. Like elsewhere in Europe, rural dwellers moved from the more remote rural areas to the coastal urban centres where industries provided work. Remaining rural dwellers face difficulties with maintaining a living from forestry and farming in these areas which hold nature, and increasingly become recognised as high nature value (HNV) areas. People living from the land balance between being productive (e.g. produce cheap kilograms of meat for the food industries) and maintain natural values (such as the autochthonous forests, heterogeneous grasslands, bees, wildlife).

Study area for MSc projects is the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve ‘Os Ancares’, a remote mountainous area in the inland of Galicia (in northwestern Spain).

In this context, MSc research projects can be formulated about:

  • Household production: mapping relations of households with forests and pastures in the area, either privately or communally owned land, with the aim to improve understanding of what and how the farmers in the area produce (food as well as other ecosystem services), how modes of production differ among farmers, how farmers benefit from farm activities, and how this relates to other household activities;
  • Collaborative approaches: identify and map initiatives that support rural development in the area (producer cooperatives and farmers’ markets, accountancy services, ecologist movements, regional rural development networks) with the aim to analyse and understand the social relations and values from which these initiatives emerge and develop;
  • Policy dynamics: aim is to deliver insight into the policy dynamics that enable, support, and proliferate endogenous rural development in the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve ‘Os Ancares’, for which social relations and policy schemes are identified, interpreted, combined, and discussed with stakeholders in the area.

Researchers with extended networks in Galicia co-supervise these projects. For more information: Joost Jongerden

MSc Thesis opportunity: Growing Home – Food Culture and Urban Households in Galicia

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In Galicia, homegrown food still takes an important place in food culture, in rural and in urban households but also in eating out. In the past decades, rural dwellers moved from remote rural areas to the coastal urban centres where industries provided work. Whilst new generations increasingly work and organize their life and leisure time in urban environments, the elderly generation keep strong ties to the villages in which they grew up, to the people there, and the land. This way part of urban food consumption stems from produce in home gardens, sometimes at large distance from the urban environment in which people reside. This has implications for farmers who aim to anchor their business in direct producer-consumer relations, a trend which also in Galicia manifests but remains limited due to private access to fresh, homegrown food in urban households.

In this context, MSc research projects can be formulated about:

  • Home consumption of food: this project aims to map and understand relations of urban households with land, be this located in the city or in villages at distance, and to improve understanding of how people value homegrown food, what and how they organize production, and whom benefit from this;
  • Food initiatives: identify and map initiatives like neighbour markets, consumer cooperatives, farmers’ markets, allotment gardens et cetera with the aim to analyse and understand better the social relations and values from which these initiatives emerge and develop;
  • Short food chains: study business initiatives of farmers (vegetables, dairy, meat) who turn their local resources into consumer products, whereby consumers are willing to pay for value added by producers (local varieties of e.g. tomatoes and lattice, organic, grazing systems, use of autochthonous breeds);
  • Food forests: large part of Galicia is covered with communal forests. Progressive communities look for ways to benefit from this resource. Is there a future for e.g. honey, mushroom and chestnut production in Galician forests? Map and analyse social relations, and motivations;
  • Gastronomy and tourism: chefs in restaurants cook with and serve local and regional products (vegetables, meat, wine), but what makes it that chefs buy to local providers? Who are these farmers? How do they produce, and how do chefs benefit from this in their kitchen?

Researchers with extended networks in Galicia co-supervise these projects. For more information: Joost Jongerden

Understanding food systems’ change: the making and the practicing of the school food reform in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil – PhD-thesis Camilo Lozano

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Wednesday, March 13 2019, at 1.30 pm CET Camilo Lozano will defend his PhD-thesis ‘Understanding food systems’ change: the making and the practicing of the school food reform in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil’.

The ceremony will be live streamed by Weblectures.wur.nl but can be viewed later as well. The full thesis will be available online after the defence ceremony.

 

Seminar: Food, masculinity and environmental caring

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We invite you to attend the CSPS Critical Food Studies Speaker Series on March 19th, featuring Emma Roe and Paul Hurley (University of Southampton). Their research explores the role of gender and care in sustainable diets.

When:    19 March 2019    15.30-17.30

Where:   Leeuwenborch, lecture hall C 62

Programme

15.30-15.40          Walk-in with coffee

15.40-15.45          Introduction and welcome (Dr Stefan Wahlen, CSPS Foodscapes Cluster)

15.45-17.00          Sustainable diets, masculinities and environmental caring: Gendered understandings of movements towards sustainable agro-food practices, Dr Paul Hurley & Dr Emma Roe, Geography and Environmental Science, University of Southampton

17.00-17.30          Discussion with drinks and bites

Abstract:

The impact of industrial scale food production poses significant threats to environmental sustainability. Despite the current rising trends of veganism, ‘flexitarianism’ and ‘reducetarianism’ in some areas, global levels of animal-based protein consumption are on the rise – between 1993-2013 global population increased by 29%, yet global demand for animals’ products increased by 62% (Food and Agriculture Organization (2014) State of Food Insecurity in the World 2014: In Brief (FAO, Rome)). The IPCC has recently suggested that dietary shifts (reducing meat consumption as well as shortening supply chains and lessening food waste), could play a significant factor in climate change mitigation (IPCC (2018) SR1.5).

An often overlooked dimension of sustainability issues is that of gender (see, for instance, UNFCCC’s work on Women and Climate Change).The performance of diverse masculinities is receiving increased attention more widely, following the popular critical label of ‘toxic masculinity’ and its association with a raft of negative practices from the #MeToo campaign, through to weak leadership on global environmental challenges. This is a timely moment to increase studies on the cultural, social and political dynamics that drive the performances of diverse forms of masculinity, in order to appraise how to offer more environmentally sustainable forms of living.

Recent work by Roe and Hurley in their project ‘Man Food: Exploring men’s opportunities for ‘Becoming an ecological citizen’ through protein-related food practices’, focusses explicitly on studying practices of being a man in relation to food and environmental caring. Through a series of participatory workshops, in which researchers cooked, ate and talked with groups of men, they have sought to understand more about the interaction of gendered identity norms and barriers to ecological caring and responsibility. Key findings of the project include the fact that a number of men had experienced shame and bullying about choosing vegetarian food options among groups of other men, and that others were willing to try alternatives to meat-based meals but hadn’t had the social reference points to encourage them to do so (lacking peers who didn’t eat meat, or the skills to cook vegetarian food). More recent work has begun to consider these gendered practices of food and environmental caring within the broader social and political contexts of populism, both in the UK and more widely.