What if the Trucks Stop Coming? – PhD thesis by Cheron Constance

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On Wednesday 21 June 2017 at 13.30 hrs Cheron Constance will defend her PhD thesis entitled ‘What if the trucks stop coming? Exploring the framing of local food by cooperative food retailers in New Mexico’ in the Auditorium of Wageningen University. The ceremony will be live streamed by WURTV but can be viewed later as well.

The full thesis will be available online after the defence ceremony.

 

Summary of the thesis

Proponents of local food cite a variety of economic and environmental advantages of short food supply chains. Consumer interest in local food has also offered a point of differentiation for many players in the food industry, including restaurants and grocery stores. Engaging with local food has significant challenges, however, and many production and distribution systems engender and support more diffuse food provisioning, not less. Though food can travel thousands of miles from its point of origin to consumption, many cooperative (co-op) grocery stores have long sold locally-produced food and have deep ties to their supplier communities. This thesis offers case studies of two co-ops in the natural and organic food sector and examines how they think about and work with local food. The theories of embeddedness (after Polanyi) and diverse economies (from Gibson-Graham) undergird the analyses of these co-ops’ involvement with local food and how the cooperative business model relates to it.

International conference New Extractivism, Peasantries and Social Dynamics: call for papers

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The BRICS Initiative in Critical Agrarian Studies will have its fourth conference entitled ‘New Extractivism, Peasantries and Social Dynamics: Critical Perspectives and Debates’, this time in Moscow, 13-16 October 2017.

Deadline for submission of abstracts is June 15. Selected Abstracts will be invited to submit full papers. All papers will be published online as BICAS working paper and will be uploaded on to the conference website and might be selected for a Special Issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

 

Masterclass prof. Katherine Gibson – Performative Practices for Diverse Economies

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katherine_gibson_2015Join us! For a unique masterclass with prof. Katherine Gibson (Western Sydney University), internationally known for her research on rethinking economies as sites of ethical action.

When: Tuesday June 27, 2017 from 9.30 – 12.30 (CET)
Where: Wageningen University and Research, exact location to be announced

The masterclass is organised in conjunction with the CSPS Conference ‘The Value of Life’.

Description
Over the last decades neoliberal solutions for societal problems have received a wide range of critique, ranging from the off-shoring of wealth and power, ecological degradation, and more in particular, for its underlying morality. Several author have argued that we need to move from a critique and a position of  ‘opposition’  to the development of alternatives by making visible what has been rendered invisible as a result of the neoliberal gaze. This is what Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham refer to as performative practices for diverse economies. On the one hand, they argue, the diverse economy is around us, but we have been de-skilled and therefore are unable to recognize these practices as relevant and important . On the other hand, critical social research can contribute to the furthering of these practices.

In this masterclass we will firstly discuss the idea of performative practices and the need to go beyond critique, and secondly the methodological question of how to make visible what is invisible?

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The iceberg image, showing diverse economies practices as submerged under the surface. Retrieved from: http://www.communityeconomies.org/home/key-ideas

 

For who?
This masterclass  is intended for MSc students, PhD candidates, postdocs and staff members, across the social and environmental sciences, who (intend to) engage in research on diverse economic practices and are interested in exploring methodological issues, such as:

  • How to make ‘invisible’ practices visible?
  • How to get beyond a capitalocentric discourse and construct a language of economic diversity?
  • What are techniques for performing diverse economies and how can we as academics contribute to what’s happening ‘on the ground’?

Participants are expected to read and prepare their thoughts on readings in advance of the master class. A reading list will be shared with the participants after registration.

Registration
To register, please send an email to Anke de Vrieze, anke.devrieze@wur.nl or Joost Jongerden, joost.jongerden@wur.nl.

Course participants are to submit a short statement of interest( max. 1 A4)  by June 20. The statement of interest must 1) introduce who you are in terms of disciplinary background and education; 2) motivate why you want to participate in this masterclass; and 3) include questions or issues you would like to discuss during the master class.

The maximum number of participants is 20. The masterclass is free of charge, but registration is obligatory.

Kick-off Horizon 2020 project ROBUST

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Recently a Horizon 2020 grant of € 6 million was awarded for a project entitled ‘Rural-Urban Outlooks: Unlocking Synergies’ (ROBUST). ROBUST has started on the 1st of June 2017 and is coordinated by Han Wiskerke of the Rural Sociology Group.

The overall goal of ROBUST is to a) advance our understanding of the interactions and dependencies between rural, peri-urban and urban areas, and b) identify and promote policies, governance models and practices that foster mutually beneficial relations.

The project focusses on five domains of urban-rural relations & interdependencies: 1) New businesses and labour markets; 2) Public infrastructures and social services; 3) Sustainable food systems, 4) Cultural connections, and 5) Ecosystem services. These domains will be studied in 11 place-based living labs: Ede (Netherlands), Tukums (Latvia), Helsinki (Finland), Mid-Wales (UK), Gloucestershire (UK), Frankfurt-Rhein-Main metropole (Germany), Ljubljana Urban Region (Slovenia), Styria (Austria), Valencia (Spain), Province of Lucca (Italy) and Lisbon and Tagus Valley Region (Portugal). Each Living Labs will focus on three domains of urban-rural relations. Domain-specific lessons and experiences will be shared across Living Labs in thematic Communities of Practice (five in total, each covering one of the aforementioned domains of urban-rural relations).

In each Living Lab a research organisation (university, research institute or consultancy firm) will collaborate with a local or regional authority. For the Dutch case the Rural Sociology Group will collaborate with Ede Municipality. In total the ROBUST consortium consists of 24 partners: 11 research organisations, 11 local or regional authorities and two umbrella organisations: the Peri-Urban Regions Platform Europe (PURPLE) and the European Secretariat of the International Network of Local Governments for Sustainability (ICLEI Europe).

The kick-off meeting will take place on 7, 8 and 9 June in the Akoesticum in Ede. The website of the project is expected to be ready by September 2017. For more information about ROBUST, please contact one of the members of the RSO ROBUST team: Han Wiskerke, Henk Oostindie, Rudolf van Broekhuizen, Jessica Duncan and Bettina Bock.

“Global Food Security Governance” at Kyoto University

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By Joëlla van de Griend

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In-class debate on trade and food security

 

Kyoto University’s Graduate School of Economics, as part of the Asian Platform for Global Sustainability & Transcultural Studies (AGST), aims to contribute to sustainable development in Asia and throughout the world. Wageningen University’s Rural Sociology Group is a key partner in this platform. As a part of this partnership, Dr. Jessica Duncan has come to Kyoto University to teach a course on Global Food Security Governance.

Taking a sociological approach, the course covers a variety of angles to think about global food security governance. The course is attended by graduate students, PhD candidates and faculty members, which has contributed to rich discussions. Furthermore, amongst the participants there is a large variety of backgrounds and fields of expertise such as law, economics, development studies, business management, political science, and agricultural science with attendants coming from Asia, Europe and Africa.

One of the students attending the class is Wurihan. She decided to follow the course because of a growing interest in policy regarding food security. Before attending Kyoto University as a research student, she went to an agricultural university in China where she studied geographical information systems:

“I used to think that to ensure food security we should increase efficiency in production. But after I did some fieldwork I found it was more about policy and how this can sometimes turn out differently than policy makers intend.”

That is why she wants to learn more about food governance in order to understand how we can contribute to solutions of problems like the distribution of food and obesity.

As one of the objectives of the course is to explore the complexity of the thinking about food security, many theories and approaches are discussed and explored in class while using “framing” as a method to understand the different (often competing) perspectives.

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