Description
Recent agri-food studies, including commodity systems, the political economy of agriculture, regional development, and wider examinations of the rural dimension in economic geography and rural sociology have been confronted by three challenges. These can be summarized as: ‘more than human’ approaches to economic life; a ‘post-structural political economy’ of food and agriculture; and calls for more ‘enactive’, performative research approaches.
This volume describes the genealogy of such approaches, drawing on the reflective insights of more than five years of international engagement and research. It demonstrates the kinds of new work being generated under these approaches and provides a means for exploring how they should be all understood as part of the same broader need to review theory and methods in the study of food, agriculture, rural development and economic geography. This radical collective approach is elaborated as the Biological Economies approach. The authors break out from traditional categories of analysis, reconceptualising materialities, and reframing economic assemblages as biological economies, based on the notion of all research being enactive or performative.
Table of Contents
1. Assembling Generative Approaches in Agri-food Research
Nick Lewis, Richard Le Heron, Michael Carolan, Hugh Campbell and Terry Marsden
Part 1: Re-making Knowledges of Agri-food
2. Practices, Qualities and the Vital Materialism of Food: Biological Economies and Processes of Consumption
David Evans
3. The Borderlands of Animal Disease: Knowing and Governing Animal Disease in Biological Economies
Gareth Enticott
4. Re-shaping "Soft Gold": Fungal Agency and the Bioeconomy in the Caterpillar Fungus Market Assemblage
Janke Linke
5. Enacting Swiss Cheese: About the Multiple Ontologies of Local Food
Jeremie Forney
6. Worlds of Rice: Understanding Agri-food Systems as Assemblages
Angga Dwiartama, Chris Rosin and Hugh Campbell
7. Materialising Taste: Fatty Lambs to Eating Quality, Taste Projects in Red Meat
Matt Henry and Michael Roche
8. Enactive Encounters with the Langstroth Hive: Post-human Framing of the Work of Bees
Roseanna Spiers and Nick Lewis
9. Ever-Redder Apples: How Aesthetics Shape the Biology of Markets
Katharine Legun
10. Value and Values in the Making of Merino
Harvey Perkins and Eric Pawson
11. Eating the Unthinkable: The Case of ENTO, Eating Insects and Bioeconomic Experimentation
Paul V. Stock, Catherine Phillips, Hugh Campbell and Anne Murcott
12. Enacting BAdairying: Towards an Emergent Politics of New Soil Resourcefulness?
Richard Le Heron, Geoff Smith, Erena Le Heron and Mike Roche
Part 2: Enacting New Politics of Knowledge
13. In Your Face: Why Food Is Politics and Why We Are Finally Starting to Admit It
Michael M. Bell
14. Geographers at Work in Disruptive Human-biophysical Projects: Methodology as Ontology in Reconstituting Nature-society Knowledge
Erena Le Heron, Nick Lewis and Richard Le Heron
15. Food Utopias: Performing Emergent Scholarship and Agri-food Futures
Chris Rosin, Paul Stock and Michael Carolan
16. The Very Public Nature of Agri-food Scholarship, and its Problems and Possibilities
Michael Carolan
17. Eating Bioeconomies
Michael Goodman
18. Biological Economies as an Academic and Political Project
Hugh Campbell, Richard Le Heron, Michael Carolan and Nick Lewis
