Discomfort food: food and food space in progressive, counter-hegemonic struggle
| Author(s) | Obringer, Kelsey M. | |
| Date Accessioned | 2021-11-09T14:19:13Z | |
| Date Available | 2021-11-09T14:19:13Z | |
| Publication Date | 2021 | |
| SWORD Update | 2021-08-09T22:11:58Z | |
| Abstract | Food justice is often conceived of as an effort to address oppression and inequality in the food system. Over the last 50 years this emphasis on identifying, addressing, and eradicating the injustices of the food system have led to considerable growth in the number of organizations, operations, and agendas that have critically sought to increase access to healthy, affordable, and culturally appropriate food. Scholarly work on the relationship between food and justice has tended center around these operations and thus a conceptualization of food justice that takes the food system as the sight of struggle. Critical food scholars, however, have argued that a commitment to food justice requires that we understand the root causes of injustices within the food system, and work to end those, just as we have worked to end hunger, malnutrition, labor abuses, obesity, etc. through initiatives such as community gardens, farmer’s markets, fair trade labeling, and urban agriculture. This has led to a broadening of food justice beyond food provisioning to include an examination of more explicitly political action. ☐ Building off the work of critical food scholars who seek an understanding of the relationship between food and justice beyond the food access and provisioning, this dissertation explores how food and food space can be used as one aspect of a progressive counter-hegemonic strategy. It brings together critical approaches to food justice and radical democratic theory in order to investigate the place and meaning of food and food space in the broader struggle against injustice and inequality. The stories, experiences, and strategies of activists who center food in their social justice work serve to illustrate the dynamics of food and food space as sites for the practice of counter-hegemonic resistance. Empirical examples and existing theory are combined to theorize the functions that food and food space can play in the counter-hegemonic struggle. Food and food space, I argue, are a unique means by which activists work to affectively and viscerally entice eaters into questioning the world around them, a preliminary though necessary step in the long-term and often intangible journey toward raising a counter-hegemonic political consciousness and imagining new worlds. | en_US |
| Advisor | Rasmussen, Claire | |
| Degree | Ph.D. | |
| Department | University of Delaware, Department of Political Science and International Relations | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.58088/fmdk-9856 | |
| Unique Identifier | 1284918557 | |
| URL | https://udspace.udel.edu/handle/19716/29351 | |
| Language | en | |
| Publisher | University of Delaware | en_US |
| URI | https://login.udel.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/discomfort-food-space-progressive-counter/docview/2572622945/se-2?accountid=10457 | |
| Keywords | Hegemony | |
| Keywords | Food space | |
| Keywords | Food justics | |
| Keywords | Urban agriculture | |
| Keywords | Community gardens | |
| Title | Discomfort food: food and food space in progressive, counter-hegemonic struggle | en_US |
| Type | Thesis | en_US |