Research Update – July 6, 2008

A very quick update here – I’m still writing (which is pretty uninteresting for all of you at this stage), but here are a couple of other bits of news relating to the research project:

Link with Community Food and Health Scotland

Community Food and Health Scotland were good enough to mention the research project in the June 2008 edition of Fare Choice, their (free) monthly newsletter, which is available to download here. Amongst the other food related news from Scotland, the Local Foods Research Project gets a mention on page 14.

Article accepted for publication

An article I submitted to the geographical journal Area has been accepted for publication, which is good news. The article emerged from the reading of the academic literature on alternative and local food networks which I did earlier this year, and engages with the critique that alternative food networks often reproduce the characteristics of neoliberalism that they set out to oppose.

The article will be publihed online later this year, and then in the journal itself. I’ll post a link to the full article once it is available online. Here’s the abstract:

Neoliberal subjectivities or a politics of the possible? Reading for difference in alternative food networks

“Recent research on alternative food networks has highlighted the centrality of place-embeddedness as a strategy in constructing alternatives to conventional agri-industrial food systems, and has illustrated the political nature of these strategic localisms. Recently, critical human geographers and sociologists have drawn on relational theory to criticise the localism of alternative food networks as representing a politics of place which is unreflexive or defensive. Furthermore, some readings of alternative food networks argue that they reproduce the very neoliberal subjectivities that they seek to oppose. This article argues that agri-food scholars should be aware of the ways in which their readings of alternative food networks can guide and reproduce alternative food network practice. Drawing on Gibson-Graham’s technique of ‘reading for difference’, I argue for a reading of alternative food networks that sees difference beyond the discursive field of neoliberalism. The article explores recent debates around governmentality as the mechanism through which neoliberal subjectivities are reproduced, and draws on a preliminary discussion of the alternative food network practice of the 100 Mile Diet in order to illustrate the arguments made.”