CFP-RGS-IBG-2007.
Please respond by 31st January 2007 to Mike Goodman
([log in to unmask]), Damian Maye ([log in to unmask]) and Lewis
Holloway ([log in to unmask])
Ethical food-scapes?: Conceptualising the premises, promises, and possibilities
of alternative food networks
In the last few years, alternative food networks (AFNs) have become ascendant in
academic and policy work on food systems and those in the UK in particular. In
short, these networks are constructed as containing a series of cross-cutting
alternative socio-economic production/consumption imaginaries and
materialities. Most predominately, AFNs are understood as the provisioning of
quality foods that work to ‘re-embed’ the relations of production, consumption
and ecology in notions of connectedness and closeness. More recently, local
food provisioning and processes of ‘re-localization’ are beginning to figure
predominantly in academic and popular accounts of AFNs. The growth of local
food networks has quickly claimed the cultural, economic, and political
imaginaries of academics, food activists, the media, and a growing number of
consumers. And yet, short of a few germinal papers, the moral and ethical
premises, promises and possibilities of these growing networks have remained in
their empirical and theoretical infancy. This is surprising given the so-called
‘moral’ turn within AFN studies, the discipline and critical theory more
generally. Against these theoretical and empirical concerns, we seek papers
interested in exploring the discursive and material creation of the moral
economies of AFNs and the potential to which, at wider conceptual and
geographic scales, we are seeing the beginnings of a ‘moral landscape’ in the
constitution and expression of AFNs in the UK food-scape and beyond. And, while
the focus is AFNs, the session is keen to attract papers that fall outside this
conceptual boundary, especially as a device for critical comment. Ethical
food-scapes are, for example, promoted by corporate business and retail, with
strategies in place to promote social responsibility, ethical auditing, supply
chain transparency and community cohesion. Some potential key questions/topics
include:
• How and why are particular production and/or retail standards enshrined as
‘ethical’ and how do they work in practice?
• What is the role of food policy and institutional governance in developing and
policing such standards, including mechanisms to meet consumer interests?
• What are the (dis)connections between 'ethical/moral' and 'alternative' in
AFNs and/or conventional food networks? In other words, is there slippage
between the discursive and material constructions of what is 'ethical/moral'
and 'alternative' in AFNs and conventional networks and what does this mean for
conceptualising these networks?
• How do these networks understand and express notions of ‘place’ and ‘space’,
and indeed, ethics/morality, differently than conventional food networks and
how might this contribute to our understandings of rural, urban and consumption
spaces, places, and ethics? In short, what are the ‘politics of place’ and/or
‘politics of rurality/urbanity’ in AFN networks?
• How are ethical food-scapes studied, especially as heuristic devices to
understand the premises, promises and possibilities of AFNs? In short, what are
the methodological implications?
Please send abstracts of 200 words for papers addressing these and other related
questions by 31st January 2007 to: Mike Goodman ([log in to unmask]),
Damian Maye ([log in to unmask]) and Lewis Holloway
([log in to unmask]).
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