Emancipatory or Neoliberal Food Politics? Exploring the “Politics of Collectivity” of Buying Groups in the Search for Egalitarian Food Democracies

In the context of apolitical tendencies in food studies, this paper explores how alternative food networks can contribute to developing emancipatory food politics rather than constitute a tool to reproduce neoliberal subjectivities. For this purpose, I contend that the post‐political literature offers a useful approach to examining the concept of food politics by developing a more robust theoretical framework, permitting the establishment of linkages with broader contemporary processes of social change. The analysis of an action‐research process with buying groups in Spain is used to examine the “politics of collectivity” at play, that is, how these initiatives institutionalise “the political”. Specifically I explore the motivations mobilised to construct place‐based ethical repertoires and unveil how these groups govern the relationality of consumption practices in the pursuit of broader processes of change. I conclude by discussing the contribution of these initiatives to building egalitarian food democracies.     

Safe Space: Towards a Reconceptualization

The term “safe space” dates to the late twentieth century women's movement, but it has since been used in many different contexts. In this paper, we review and analyze historical and contemporary “safe spaces”. These include “separatist” safe spaces in women's, anti‐racist, and feminist communities, “inclusive” safe space classrooms, and safe spaces in which (non‐human) objects are central. We argue that safe spaces should be understood not through static and acontextual notions of “safe” or “unsafe”, but rather through the relational work of cultivating them. Such an understanding reveals several tendencies. Namely, safe spaces are inherently paradoxical. Cultivating them includes foregrounding social differences and binaries (safe–unsafe, inclusive–exclusive) as well as recognizing the porosity of such binaries. Renegotiating these binaries is necessarily incomplete; a safe space is never completely safe. Even so, we encourage the critical cultivation of safe space as a site for negotiating difference and challenging oppression.     

THE CONCEPT “SYSTEM OF PHILOSOPHY”: THE CASE OF JACOB BRUCKER'S HISTORIOGRAPHY OF PHILOSOPHY1

In this essay I examine and discuss the concept “system of philosophy” as a methodological tool in the history of philosophy; I do so in two moves. First I analyze the historical origin of the concept in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thereafter I undertake a discussion of its methodological weaknesses–a discussion that is not only relevant to the writing of history of philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but also to the writing of history of philosophy in our times, where the concept remains an important methodological tool. My first move is to analyze Jacob Brucker's employment of the concept in his influential history of philosophy, Historia critica philosophiae, dating from 1742–1744. To Brucker, a “system of philosophy” is characterized by the following four features: (a) it is autonomous in regard to other, non‐philosophical disciplines; (b) all doctrines stated within the various branches of philosophy can be deduced from one principle; (c) as an autonomous system it comprises all branches of philosophy; (d) the doctrines stated within these various branches of philosophy are internally coherent. Brucker employed the concept on the entire history of philosophy, and he gave it a defining role in regard to two other methodological concepts, namely “eclecticism” and “syncretism,” which he regarded as more or less successful forms of systematic philosophy. My second move is to point out the weakness of the concept of “system of philosophy” as a methodological tool in the history of philosophy. I argue that the interdisciplinary nature of much premodern philosophy makes Brucker's methodological concept “system of philosophy” inadequate, and that we may be better off leaving it behind in our future exploration of premodern philosophy.     

Islands as interstitial encrypted geographies: Making (and failing) cryptosecessionist exits

Initiatives to build juridically autonomous cities based on libertarian and anarcho-capitalist ideals have proliferated in the last decade. These include seasteading, charter cities, and “free private cities.” These ventures are part of a movement to build so-called “start-up societies,” which proposes developing experimental, small-scale communities to explore alternatives to the nation-state. Many such projects have turned to islands and island-creation as an interstitial space in which their experiments could unfold and benefit from being located within, but juridically autonomous from, sovereign state territories. Such experiments are linked to and build on the earlier use of islands for plantations, military bases, special economic zones (SEZs) and offshoring. These ventures also often rely on, and are shaped by, blockchain and cryptocurrencies and create what Isabelle Simpson theorizes as “encrypted geographies.” In this article, we seek to better understand how islands are used to create encrypted geographies which in turn create alternative political economies and communities and how, conversely, the imaginary of islands, enclaves and archipelagoes shapes how these alternative territories are conceptualized. We examine several attempts to create such start-up societies in the Caribbean and the Pacific to consider where, how, and why their proponents have taken to islands to establish these new encrypted geographies. The concept of interstitiality can help us understand why islands are privileged sites for the creation of encrypted geographies, and how these are used to transcend state borders yet simultaneously create digitally bordered interstitial spaces that undermine sovereign territories and currencies, empower cyber-kinetic elites, and exclude and marginalize existing island communities, natural ecosystems, and existing oceanic and archipelagic polities, cultures, and societies.     

Critical Geographies of Education Beyond “Value”: Moral Sentiments,Caring, and a Politics for Acting Differently

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Singapore between 2013 and 2014, this article discusses the ways in which students mobilise different moral and ethical values to perform informal care at a private educational institute. The task is to advance a critical analysis of how students can “act differently” from the dominant strategic and calculative image of a neoliberal actor as portrayed in broader literature. Specifically, I suggest more attention needs to be given to love and care as the basis for radical practices in everyday life. I discuss the themes of deconstructive empathy, friendship solidarities, and intergenerational love to demonstrate how caring practices can produce more‐than‐capitalist subjectivities in the neoliberalising spaces of higher education. The article adds theoretical and empirical flesh to ongoing efforts in exploring “alternative” experiences of neoliberalising education through care, love, and intimacy.     

Rethinking Justice: Struggles For Environmental Commons and the Notion of Socio‐Ecological Justice

This article introduces a notion of socio‐ecological justice based on theoretically informed empirical research on community struggles against run‐of‐river hydropower plants in Turkey. Framing this particular case as representative of a broader movement for environmental commons, and adopting an action‐theoretical perspective, it translates the emergent justice claims produced by grassroots environmental movements to the conceptual vocabulary of the theory of justice. Using Fraser's tripartite model as a starting point, it explores possibilities of expanding the borders of justice as a concept. Maintaining the intrinsic relationship between social and ecological phenomena, it calls for rethinking “sociality” and “social justice” in the light of a relational ontology of human and non‐human worlds. The notion of socio‐ecological justice, thus, extends the community of justice, framing the relational existence of human and non‐human ecologies as a matter of justice.     

Radical Urban Horticulture for Food Autonomy: Beyond the Community Gardens Experience

For those who are interested in radical changes, it is important to analyze the forms of resistance that promote self‐managed practices, also at apparently very small scale. In Italy the experience of “community gardens” is usually named “orti urbani”. In the last 10 years, the occupation of abandoned urban spaces to set up orti urbani has increased within the squatting movement. The case of the city of Rome is interesting because there has been a widespread activity to organize self‐managed spaces to grow fruit and vegetable plants. These initiatives make up not only potential spaces of dense social networking, political action and discussion on environmental issues, but also supporting large food autonomous configurations such as Genuino Clandestino, that are challenging dominant food production. A proliferation of orti urbani located in Social Centers, squatted houses or other abandoned spaces represents a scalar strategy to re‐appropriate and commune urban space.     

Rock Stars and Bad Apples: Moral Economies of Alternative Food Networks and Precarious Farm Work Regimes

Alternative food networks face both challenges and opportunities in rethinking the role of precarious employment in food system transformation. We explore how alternative food networks in British Columbia, Canada have engaged with flexible and precarious work regimes for farmworkers, including both temporary migrant workers and un(der)paid agricultural interns. Based on in‐depth interviews, participant observation and document analysis, we find that alternative food actors often normalize a precarious work regime using a moral economy frame. This framing describes precarious farm employment as either a necessary challenge in the transition to sustainability, or merely involving a few individual “bad apple” farmers. Further, this framing involves an aversion to “one‐size‐fits‐all” regulation by the state in favor of consumer‐driven regulation of labor standards. Our analysis suggests that a moral economy framing can obscure systemic inequities in precarious farm employment and dampen the impetus for structural change through collective food movement organizing.     

Potemkin Revolution: Utopian Jungle Cities of 21st Century Socialism

This paper explores the entanglement of ideology and materiality in the production of the spaces of 21^st century socialism. “Millennium Cities” are currently being constructed for indigenous communities throughout the Ecuadorian Amazon, with revenues derived from petroleum extracted within their territories. As iconic spatial symbols of the “Citizens’ Revolution”, the Millennium Cities would appear to embody “the original accumulation of 21^st century socialism”—a utopian state ideology promising the collective appropriation of natural resources without the dispossession of the peasantry. Drawing on extensive field research, we argue that they are better understood as a simulation of urban modernity that is symptomatic of the predominance of ground rent in South American capitalism, and which conceals the violent repression of an autonomous indigenous project of petroleum‐based modernization. The original accumulation of 21^st century socialism can therefore be interpreted as a “fantasy of origins”, which functions to reproduce the primitive accumulation of capital.     

Telling stories: Exploring research storytelling as a meaningful approach to knowledge mobilization with Indigenous research collaborators and diverse audiences in community‐based participatory research

A growing number of geographers seek to communicate their research to audiences beyond the academy. Community‐based and participatory action research models have been developed, in part, with this goal in mind. Yet despite many promising developments in the way research is conducted and disseminated, researchers continue to seek methods to better reflect the “culture and context” of the communities with whom they work. During my doctoral research on homelessness in the Northwest Territories, I encountered a significant disconnect between the emotive, personal narratives of homelessness that I was collecting and more conventional approaches to research dissemination. In search of a method of dissemination to engage more meaningfully with research collaborators as well as the broader public, I turned to my creative writing work. In this article, I draw from “The komatik lesson” to discuss my first effort at research storytelling. I suggest that research storytelling is particularly well suited to community‐based participatory research, as we explore methods to present findings in ways that are more culturally appropriate to the communities in which the research takes place. This is especially so in collaborative research with Indigenous communities, where storytelling and knowledge sharing are often one and the same. However, I also discuss the ways in which combining my creative writing interests with my doctoral research has been an uneasy fit, forcing me to question how to tell a good story while giving due diligence to the role that academic research has played in its development. Drawing on the outcomes and challenges I encountered, I offer an understanding of what research storytelling is, and how it might be used to advance community‐based participatory research with Indigenous communities.     

Micro Aggressions and Connections in the Context of National Multiculturalism: Everyday Geographies of Racialisation and Resistance in Contemporary Scotland

This paper is organised around geographies of encounter, power and living together. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews and focus groups in the West and North of Glasgow, I explore the micro connections and aggressions shaping everyday encounters for some (ethnic and cultural) minorities, contributing to debates on the potentials and challenges of multicultural living. The research contributes to this work by offering a detailed embodied/felt account of belonging and racism in contemporary Glasgow, challenging dominant narratives that construct Scottishness as having “no problem with racism”. As worrying shifts around immigration and multiculturalism continue on a broader political level, including in Scotland, I use the conceptual frame of micro connection, to detail how people actively resist being racialised and othered, and attempt to transform public spaces in Glasgow by “quietly” carving out and inhabiting alternative spaces of belonging.     

Rethinking Territory

Abstract: Territory is the quintessential state space and appears to be of growing political importance. It is also a key concept in geography, but it has not been subject to as much critical attention as related geographical terms and remains under‐theorised. Taking my cue from Timothy Mitchell's suggestion that the state should be understood as the effect of social practices, I argue that the phenomenon that we call territory is not an irreducible foundation of state power, let alone the expression of a biological imperative. Instead, territory too must be interpreted principally as an effect. This “territory‐effect” can best be understood as the outcome of networked socio‐technical practices. Thus, far from refuting or falsifying network theories of spatiality, the current resurgence of territory can be seen as itself a product of relational networks. Drawing on an empirical case study of the monitoring of regional economic performance through the measurement of gross value added (GVA), I show that “territory” and “network” are not, as is often assumed, incommensurable and rival principles of spatial organisation, but are intimately connected.     

The Policy Sciences of Social Media

Twitter, Facebook, and other social media are increasingly touted as platforms not merely for networks of friends and for private diversion, but as vehicles that allow ordinary people to enter and influence the many arenas of public life. On the surface, the disparate and shapeless population of “i‐reporters,” policy “tweeters,” and anonymous news web site “commentators” would appear to challenge the comparatively well‐defined cast of professional diplomats, journalists, and propagandists that Harold D. Lasswell identified as policy‐oriented communicators. However, to illuminate the roles and impacts of social media in politics and policymaking, insights from Lasswell's “science of communication” must be embedded in Lasswell's broader lessons on value assets and outcomes. A closer look at the so‐called democratizing functions of social media in politics reveals the influence of powerful intermediaries who filter and shape electronic communications. Lasswell's insights on the likelihood of increased collaboration among political elites and skilled, “modernizing intellectuals” anticipates contemporary instances of state actors who recruit skilled creators and users of social media—collaborations that may or may not advance experiments in democracy. Lasswell's decision process concept is deployed to discover social media's strengths and weaknesses for the practicing policy scientist.     

Neoliberalism and the Aestheticization of New Middle‐Class Landscapes

Abstract: If according to Terry Eagleton (The Ideology of the Aesthetic 1990:28), the aesthetic is from the start “a contradictory, double‐edged concept”, how are seemingly innocent acts of viewing and consuming aesthetically pleasing landscapes implicated in the neoliberal politics of urban restructuring? Using contemporary Shanghai as a case study, this paper critically examines the role of the aesthetic in the politics of exclusion and urban segregation in post‐Socialist Shanghai where the restructuring and commodification of erstwhile public welfare housing have led to the rapid development of private “middle‐class” gated enclaves. A central objective of this paper is to excavate the underlying cultural politics of neoliberalism and demonstrate how the aestheticization of urban spaces in Shanghai has become increasingly intertwined with and accentuated by neoliberal ideologies and exclusionary practices in the city. Imbricated in the pristine neighborhoods of Shanghai's gated communities are the fault lines of social division and class distinction that are rapidly transforming urban China.     

Enacting Experimental Alternative Spaces

This paper analyses the experimental nature of alternative spaces and the affective, emotional and embodied experience their enactment generates. In so doing, it grounds the analysis on the intentional community of Damanhur (Italy), as an example of experimental spaces. Scholarship concerning intentional communities draws on utopian studies that consider them as utopian laboratories. More recently, non‐representational approaches have emphasised the processual nature of utopias, yet studies have overlooked the experimental nature of these alternative spaces. Drawing upon in‐depth ethnographic data, this paper engages with community experimentations that took place in Damanhur for residents and visitors. It illustrates how utopian enactment is experimental and thus, disordering, unsettling and creative. Moreover, I argue that experimentations are not limited to unsettling the social structure of the community and, when studying the enactment of alternative spaces, emphasis should also be on their capacity to affect the individual.     

Who Counts? Dilemmas of Justice in a Postwestphalian World

Abstract: Who counts as a subject of justice? Not so long ago, it was widely assumed that those “who counted” were simply the citizens of a bounded territorial state. Today, however, as activists target injustices that cut across borders, that “Westphalian” view is contested and the “who” of justice is an object of hot dispute. This new situation calls for a new kind of justice theorizing, whose contours I sketch in this essay. Arguing, first, for a reflexive mode of theorizing, I introduce the concept of “misframing”, which can subject the Westphalian “who” to critical scrutiny. Arguing, second, for the necessity of a substantive normative principle to evaluate competing “who’s”, I introduce the “all‐subjected principle” as superior to three better known alternatives: namely, membership, humanism, and the all‐affected principle.     

1. DECENTERING HISTORY: LOCAL STORIES AND CULTURAL CROSSINGS IN A GLOBAL WORLD

This essay was first presented at the 2010 Ludwig Holberg Prize Symposium in Bergen, Norway, where I, as the prize recipient, was asked to describe my work and its import for our period of globalization. The essay first traces the interconnected processes of “decentering” history in Western historiography in the half century after World War II: the move to working people and “subaltern classes”; to women and gender; to communities defined by ethnicity and race; to the study of non‐Western histories and world or global history, in which the European trajectory is only one of several models. Can the historian hold onto the subjects of “decentered” social and cultural history, often local and full of concrete detail, and still address the perspectives of global history? To suggest an answer to this question, I describe my own decentering path from work on sixteenth‐century artisans in the 1950s to recent research on non‐European figures such as the Muslim “Leo Africanus” (Hasan al‐Wazzan). I then offer two examples in which concrete cases can serve a global perspective. One is a comparison of the literary careers of Ibn Khaldun and Christine de Pizan in the scribal cultures on either side of the Mediterranean in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The other is the transmission and transformation of practices of divination, healing, and detection from Africa to the slave communities of Suriname in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.     

Global Public Policy,Transnational Policy Communities,and Their Networks

Public policy has been a prisoner of the word “state.” Yet, the state is reconfigured by globalization. Through “global public–private partnerships” and “transnational executive networks,” new forms of authority are emerging through global and regional policy processes that coexist alongside nation‐state policy processes. Accordingly, this article asks what is “global public policy”? The first part of the article identifies new public spaces where global policies occur. These spaces are multiple in character and variety and will be collectively referred to as the “global agora.” The second section adapts the conventional policy cycle heuristic by conceptually stretching it to the global and regional levels to reveal the higher degree of pluralization of actors and multiple‐authority structures than is the case at national levels. The third section asks: who is involved in the delivery of global public policy? The focus is on transnational policy communities. The global agora is a public space of policymaking and administration, although it is one where authority is more diffuse, decision making is dispersed and sovereignty muddled. Trapped by methodological nationalism and an intellectual agoraphobia of globalization, public policy scholars have yet to examine fully global policy processes and new managerial modes of transnational public administration.     

Knowing “Good Food”: Immigrant Knowledge and the Racial Politics of Farmworker Food Insecurity

Abstract: This article explores the ways that farmworkers, many of whom come from a culture deeply rooted in food and agricultural practices, cope with food insecurity by utilizing their agricultural and nutritional knowledge. Food assistance providers in the USA often treat farmworkers' inability to afford healthy food as a lack of knowledge about healthy eating, reinforcing racialized assumptions that people of color don't know “good” food. I argue that in contrast to food banks and low‐income nutrition programs, home and community gardens provide spaces for retaining and highlighting agricultural, cultural, and dietary practices and knowledge. This paper investigates the linkages between workers' place in the food system as both producers and consumers, simultaneously exploited for their labor, and creating coping strategies utilizing agrarian and culinary knowledge. I argue that food security and healthy eating, rather than being a matter of consumers making healthy “choices”, is a matter of class‐based and racial differences in the food system.     

EMBEDDEDNESS AND THE (RE)MAKING OF RETAIL SPACE IN THE REALM OF MULTICHANNEL RETAILING: THE CASE OF MIGROS SANAL MARKET IN TURKEY

The purpose of this article is to investigate the value of the concept of embeddedness for economic geographers. Alongside the case study of the multichannel grocery retailing brand Migros in Turkey, the spatial impacts – in relational and physical terms – of digitalization and the integration of an online shop into the profile of a supermarket chain are investigated. In applying the concept of embeddedness the article seeks to understand these complex, diverse and uneven processes of (retail) restructurings that affect different dimensions and dynamics of networks, societies and spaces. In my case study I identify two dimensions of embeddedness processes: (1) embedding the online shop in the firm's routines and practices, whereby processes of transfer of knowledge and technology dominate; and (2) embedding online shopping in the customer's routines and practices, whereby processes of adaption to consumer culture dominate. These dimensions are reflexive and as such mirror ongoing negotiation processes between the two stakeholders. On one hand multichannel retailing thus not only alters where but also how people shop, and can result in new retail spaces like pick‐up stores. On the other hand it can be shown, that the “locations”, where online shopping of Migros is available, reproduce spatial variations of socio‐economic factors, such as income distribution or population density. As such, the concept of embeddedness is useful for economic geographers – also in the realm of e‐commerce – to unravel the interconnections of societal, organizational and spatial patterns as well as their variations across space. The study is based on qualitative interviews.