Dates: 13 > 15 September 2023
Venue: Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB Solbosch) - BE
Funding: FNRS ; Faculté de Philosophie et Sciences Sociales ; ERC Starting Grant « SeedsValues » ; Marie-Skłodowska Curie postdoctoral fellowship « TIPSP »

Abstract

The health, environmental and economic impacts of industrial food systems have prompted activists and academics alike to think of alternative ways of producing and consuming food. Activists and academics have promoted alternative food movements contrasting the ecological-sustainability, health benefits and (ostensibly) worker friendly of such movements with the human and environmental suffering associated with agro-industrial food production, distribution and consumption. Other scholars have problematized such claims, calling into question the liberatory potential of alternative food movements. Authors have questioned the grass-roots credentials of such movements (Edelman 2014; Galvin 2021) while others have suggested alternative food movements might reinforce exploitative labour conditions or reaffirm the unequal distribution of land and wealth (Guthman 2004; García 2021; McNamara 2022). Attending to both the critiques and the praises of alternative food, this conference will take seriously the proposal that food movements outside of the industrial agricultural model have the potential to open up alternative political possibilities. Put differently it will ask: What kind of political foundations can emerge from an agro-social formation? This conference will then look to both the political conditions of possibility that underpin alternative food movements and the political possibilities such movements open up.

Donwload : Conference programme

Convenors

• Owen McNamara – Université libre de Bruxelles

Keynotes

• David Boarder Giles – Deakin University
• Birgit Müller – École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
• Brad Weiss – College of William and Mary