Report
Teaser, summary, work performed and final results
Periodic Reporting for period 1 - FOOD CITIZENS (Food citizens? Collective food procurement in European cities:solidarity and diversity, skills and scale)
Teaser
The project analyzes citizens’ initiatives in food procurement, at the level of urban foraging, short chains, and governance. It asks if and how the diversity of such initiatives surpasses or confirms hegemonic ideas about ‘who belongs’. The goal is alerting policy...
Summary
The project analyzes citizens’ initiatives in food procurement, at the level of urban foraging, short chains, and governance. It asks if and how the diversity of such initiatives surpasses or confirms hegemonic ideas about ‘who belongs’. The goal is alerting policy makers to sociocultural diversity instead of imposing ‘sustainability fixes’.
This project uses comparative participant observation in European cities and produces an interactive digital platform to visualize multiple narratives and practices of collective food procurement, in order to advance a nuanced understanding of European citizenship vis-Ã -vis sustainability challenges.
The challenge is to study and convey how styles of food procurement express and are co-produced by cultural styles of participation, despite policy imaginaries of transitions to sustainability as a mere ‘technology fix’ that should work for everyone indifferently.
We observe and communicate how relevant cultures of participation enable certain ways of innovating food procurement and not others, so that the diversity and specificity of cultures of participation can be taken into consideration in transition policies
Work performed
[ Month 1- 6] September 1st 2017 –February 1st 2018
The main activities began on time, September 2017, thanks to the fact that selections of PostDoc1 and research assistant had already been carried out in June and July 2017 (costs, including PI’s time, were borne by the Institute of Anthropology). In the first 5 months we prepared the project prior to the arrival of the PhDs.
In particular:
- Postdoc 1 systematized scientific scholarship in an annotated bibliography, which has been made available on the project as a public resource.
- Preparing the project infrastructure, including safe data storage in a Virtual Research Environment (VRE).
- The selections of the PhDs took place.
- The project website has been set up: https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/foodcitizens
- Face-to-face and skype meetings with stakeholders and members of the advisory board, plus establishing connections with additional researchers, in particular: Nemoto Shihoko, Michael Herzfeld, Coco Kanters, CORES LAB, Egidio Dansero, Cees Bronsveld, Beate Engelbrecht, Manpreet Janeja, Anouk de Koning, Taeko Udagawa, Marina
Terkurafi, Gerard Persoon, Vittorio Bianco, Fabio Parasecoli, Mateusz Halawa and Bradley Jones.
Aside from the publications listed in the continuous reporting portal, the team delivered the following conference presentations and invited talks:
- Grasseni C. November 2017. Norms and alternatives: experimentations with collective food procurement. Keynote Lecture at the Annual Meeting of the Swiss Anthropological Association, Neuchatel.
- Grasseni C. 30 October 2017. Ecology of vision and economy of citizenship: an anthropological perspective. Inaugural address at Leiden University, Leiden.
[Months 6-16] February 1st 2018 - December 15th 2018
PhDs. 1, 2 and 3 joined the team.
The team has fine-tuned a common research protocol, and prepared the theoretical groundwork of the project through weekly discussions in the PhD seminars. The PhDs wrote two essays (one engaging with the seminars literature and one contextualizing topics in the fieldwork area) and submitted their research proposal which was evaluated by the PI, the Director of Graduate Studies and a third reader.
In particular:
- The PhDs followed a series of weekly seminars and discussions, based on a reading list that has been prepared by Postdoc1 & PI. The ERC Ph.D. training program ran from 5th Feb 2018 to 11th July 2018, and continued from Aug 31st – Oct 15. It covered theoretical and methodological topics, an introduction to audio-visual media and
guest lectures by external academics. Some of these seminars were also made open to participation of other members of the institute of cultural anthropology. The full program, including a number invited guest speakers, can be found on the project website: https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/binaries/content/assets/sociale-
wetenschappen/ca-os/foodcitizens-documents/foodcitizens_readinglist.pdf
- Post-doc 1 analyzed case studies and literature in a ‘template’ for each of the three identified types of collective food procurement cases (a. urban foraging, b. short food chains, c. local food governance). These reviews contextualizes three case types vis-à -vis international scholarship. PostDoc 1 presented the templates to the team.
Two templates are available as a public resource on the project website, and the third one is currently being reworked into a journal article. Additionally, a fourth one (on Citizenship) has been reworked into a submitted article.
- PI and PostDoc1 delivered the research protocol.
- Workshop 1 with stakeholders and advisory board took place on 20th-21st June 2018. It was attended by Colin Sage, Francesca Forno, Agata Bachórz, Paolo Graziano, Tim Ingold (via Skype), Aetzel Griffioen and (invited) Cees Bronsveld.
- Two new members of the advisory board have been invited (Francesca Forno, Sociology, University of Trento and Agata Bachórz, sociol
Final results
Conceptually, we deliver a critical theory of food citizenship, adding a ‘meso’ level of sociocultural analysis to food scenarios, which mostly focus on the ‘macro’ (food systems) or ‘micro’ (individual deliberations and habituated reflexes) scale. Methodologically, we match in-depth fieldwork observation with participants’ narratives, using pioneering digital visual media to deliver collaborative and immersive ‘thick descriptions’ of their experiences and trajectories. Societal and local government stakeholders have granted access and will benefit from comparative insights.
Website & more info
More info: http://foodcitizens.eu.