personal background
I believe that in the process of designing and carrying out a research project, it is very important to be aware, even self-conscious, of one’s own motivations and reasons for establishing the project. My motivations guided my decision to carry out this research, guided the way in which I decided on a topic, guided the questions I choose to ask, and of whom, and the ways in which I choose to ask them.
When first thinking about the research I would carry out this year, I was guided by two interests - for simplicity’s sake call them sustainability and social change. Briefly, I was interested in what sustainability means and how it can be useful as a concept, and in how social change can be hindered or facilitated by the conceptual frameworks through which we understand the world. My first ideas for research centred on the production of academic knowledge, but my interest shifted fairly quickly, guided by reading and some experiences during the summer of 2007, towards a desire to engage with an aspect of sustainability and social change which is an lived, embodied part of everyone’s lives, not just the practices of a specific, and fairly exclusive subset. It emerged soon afterwards that food networks offered the a way forward.
Food is the most direct and essential link between us - our bodies, and what is popularly thought of as nature. Indeed for those questioning the division between nature and society, some of the clearest examples of socionatural objects come from the worlds of food and agriculture. Food networks are an arena of socionatural life which are experiencing stress and undergoing rapid change, and are also the focus for debates surrounding what is sustainable and how we might be able to live sustainably. Finally, social change related to food networks has undergone a significant expansion in recent years, closely tracked by burgeoning media interest and an academic literature analysing these ‘alternative food networks’. This seemed to be an appropriate niche for my research this year.
