Alternative Food Networks Goodman, David; DuPuis, E. Melanie; Goodman, Michael K.
2012, 20120220, 2011, 2012-02-20
eBook
Farmers' markets, veggie boxes, local foods, organic products and Fair Trade goods - how have these once novel, "alternative" foods, and the people and networks supporting them, become increasingly ...familiar features of everyday consumption? Are the visions of "alternative worlds" built on ethics of sustainability, social justice, animal welfare and the aesthetic values of local food cultures and traditional crafts still credible now that these foods crowd supermarket shelves and other "mainstream" shopping outlets?
This timely book provides a critical review of the growth of alternative food networks and their struggle to defend their ethical and aesthetic values against the standardizing pressures of the corporate mainstream with its "placeless and nameless" global supply networks. It explores how these alternative movements are "making a difference" and their possible role as fears of global climate change and food insecurity intensify. It assesses the different experiences of these networks in three major arenas of food activism and politics: Britain and Western Europe, the United States, and the global Fair Trade economy. This comparative perspective runs throughout the book to fully explore the progressive erosion of the interface between alternative and mainstream food provisioning. As the era of "cheap food" draws to a close, analysis of the limitations of market-based social change and the future of alternative food economies and localist food politics place this book at the cutting-edge of the field.
The book is thoroughly informed by contemporary social theory and interdisciplinary social scientific scholarship, formulates an integrative social practice framework to understand alternative food production-consumption, and offers a unique geographical reach in its case studies.
Contentious geographies Goodman, Michael K; Boykoff, Maxwell T; Evered, Kyle
2008, 20160513, 2012, 2008-05-01, 2016-05-16, 20080101
eBook, Book
The human-environment relationship - intimately intertwined and often contentious - is one of the most pressing concerns of the 21st century. Explored through an array of critical approaches, this ...book brings together case studies from across the globe to present significant cutting-edge research into political ecologies as they relate to multi-form contestations over environments, resources and livelihoods. Covering a range of issues, such as popular discourses of environmental 'collapse', climate change, water resource struggles, displacement, agro-food landscapes and mapping technologies, this edited volume works to provide a broad and critical understanding of the narratives and policies more subtly shaping and being shaped by underlying environmental conflicts. By exploring the power-laden processes by which environmental knowledge is generated, framed, communicated and interpreted, Contentious Geographies works to reveal how environmental conflicts can be (re)considered and thus (re)opened to enhance efforts to negotiate more sustainable environments and livelihoods.
Consuming space Goodman, Michael K; Goodman, David; Redclift, M. R
2010, 20160523, 2010-04-01, 2016-05-23, 2016-05-26, 20100101
eBook, Book
An examination of the relationship between space, place and consumption offers important insights into some of the most powerful forces constructing contemporary societies. Space and place are made ...and remade through consumption. Yet how do cultures of consumption discover space, and how do they construct place? This book addresses these questions by exploring the implications of conceptualizing consumption as a spatial, increasingly global, yet intensely localized activity. The work develops integrative approaches that articulate the processes involved in the production and consumption of space and place. The result is a varied, engaging, and innovative study of consumption and its role in structuring contemporary capitalist political economies.
•Digital foodscapes are increasingly populated by digital food influencers (DFIs).•Different digital platforms offer different affordances to talk about food.•DFIs create a series of good food ...grammars related to clean eating and lifestyle.•DFIs position good food within notions of how to be in life.•DFIs re-inscribe white, hetero-normative middle- and upper- class privilege.
Drawing on recent debates around food, space and digital media, this paper introduces and develops the concepts of the digital foodscape and ‘good’ food grammars. Through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of digital platforms, discourses and personas, we investigate the ways a key set of digital food influencers (DFIs) construct, curate and share the meanings of good food. We first explore who these influencers are, describe what platforms they inhabit, how the variable social media affordances work through these platforms and the notions of good food they construct. We then focus specifically on DFIs’ communicative practices on Twitter to analyse the core discourses DFIs produce and those that are taken up by audiences through re-tweets and likes as well as the re-tweeted tweets of DFIs. Overall, our findings suggest that first, good food grammars are being constructed by rule setters beyond the already well-established food personalities and celebrity chefs of the UK’s foodscape. Yet, these grammars also re-inscribe a form of white, hetero-normative middle- and upper- class privilege that produces particular grammars of good food. Second, different social media and digital platforms provide space for diverse good food grammars given their variable affordances. Twitter, in particular, is the place where the grammars of DFIs take on non-food themes such as self-empowerment, inspiration, charity campaigning and awareness raising. Third, the notions of good food in DFI grammars revolve around a range of constructions, with the most elevated related to ‘clean’ eating and/or ‘clean’ lifestyles that combined healthy, ‘free from’ diets with fitness regimes and expand DFI grammars – and ultimately their brands – into a more holistic lifestyle brand. This paper’s initial empirical and conceptual foray into digital foodscapes and DFIs opens up space for further research on food and digital media within Geography and beyond.
Many corporations are now in the business of bringing climate change ‘home’ in the everyday products that those, in much of the Minority world, can purchase and use, providing opportunities for ...consumers to literally and figuratively ‘buy in’ to climate mitigation. Yet, what are the implications of this form of highly commoditised, corporate-led, consumer-focused climate branding? In the spaces and practices of the everyday, how and in what ways are corporations framing and socialising responses to climate change and global environmental and social issues? This paper explores these 'questions through a multimodal discourse analysis of Unilever’s ‘Sustainable Living Plan’ (
2010
) and its ‘Project Sunlight’ campaign (2010–2016). Situating Unilever’s sustainability agenda as indicative of the contemporary climate politics of the corporate sector, that also represents a pivotal moment in the cultural politics of climate change, we critically interrogate Unilever’s mobilisation of the affective and emotional registers of everyday life and human relations in its model of sustainable living. Specifically, we focus on the ways that Unilever encourages acts of branded consumption as a form of—what we call here—climate care, by invoking normative discourses of gender and family through a form of biopolitics, and, at a larger scale, how the corporation is shaping how particular forms of climate capitalism are socialised, normalised and practiced. In doing so, we shift critical attention away from sustainable business analyses of Unilever onto the unexplored socio-cultural dimensions of Unilever’s sustainability model. We argue that Unilever’s socialisation of climate branding and care works to depoliticise climate change actions and actors through a biopolitics that creates a false veneer of democratisation in the form of consumer choice, thereby curtailing more progressive societal action on climate change.
ABSTRACT
Throughout the world, 785 million people lack a basic drinking‐water service and at least 2 billion people consume contaminated drinking water. At the same time, numerous global water ...charities fronted by ‘caring’, politicized celebrity figures — dubbed the ‘high priests’ of global development by the authors of this article — have sought to ‘solve’ inequalities in access to clean water through market‐based solutions and charity donations. This article engages with the fields of critical social theory, political theology, political ecology and celebrity studies to analyse the interrelationship between capitalism and religion, to interrogate the drivers of international development, and to historically situate the work of celebrity‐led water charities and the growing role of these ‘high priests’. It takes the case of Matt Damon's Water.org to examine the increasingly religious nature of these neoliberalized charity processes, and outlines the main elements of what the authors term a contemporary political economy of sacrifice. They argue that this results in charities that, rather than reducing inequalities, actually reproduce, normalize and legitimize the very system and exploitative relations that are responsible for these inequalities and environmental problems in the first place, while scattered and localized fixes sustain the illusion that things are getting better.
The Tropes of Celebrity Environmentalism Abidin, Crystal; Brockington, Dan; Goodman, Michael K ...
Annual review of environment and resources,
10/2020, Letnik:
45, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Celebrity advocacy for environmental causes has grown dramatically in recent decades. An examination of this expansion and the rise of causes such as climate change reveals the shifting politics and ...organization of advocacy. We address these changes to the construction and interpretation of celebrity advocacy and detail how they have produced a rich variety of environmental celebrity advocates. We also account for differences between legacy (e.g., radio, TV, newspapers) and online celebrities and their practices (e.g., hashtag publics, brandjacking, online communities). Environmental celebrity advocates' performances can be divided into nine tropes, each characterized in part by the particular varieties of environmentalism that they promote. We present the tropes and discuss their five cross-cutting themes. We conclude with a set of questions for future research on celebrity environmentalism.
Jason Moore's theory of the commodity frontier serves as a useful framework for demonstrating the social-ecological upheaval that occurs in the "frontier" spaces to which capitalism must expand in ...search of uncommodified, cheap nature. Work to date however has failed to consider how the impacts of frontier expansion interact with climate change despite the two phenomena being closely linked in both causes and effects, and largely impacting most severely upon rural communities in the Global South. We seek to address this gap with a focus on the coastal commodity frontier: social-ecological systems within which marine and terrestrial frontier expansion can occur concurrently, while being impacted by climatic change. The research was conducted using an ethnographic, case-study approach, centred on an eight-month research visit to Aboadze, a small-scale marine fishing community in the Western Region of Ghana. This community is subject to terrestrial frontier expansion in the form of a thermal power station, marine frontier expansion in the form of industrial overfishing, and is also exposed to the impacts of climate change. We find, through a double exposure vulnerability framework, that frontier expansion and climatic change interact to exacerbate food, water, and livelihood insecurities in the case-study community, while simultaneously reducing the community's capacity to adapt to its changing environment and perpetuating harmful global changes through feedback exposures. This research makes an important conceptual contribution by galvanizing a conversation between two thus far disparate fields and invites further research to provide more nuanced analyses of the intersectional vulnerabilities impacting coastal communities.
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