Stop FEMA Now: Social media,activism and the sacrificed citizen

In an era of late capitalism and climate crisis, an expanding, heterogeneous network of people find themselves precariously positioned at the edge of disaster. This paper explores how Stop FEMA Now, a coalition of U.S. flood disaster survivors and other coastal homeowners, used social media to challenge neoliberal policies that produced – and then privatized – environmental risk. I find that social media played a crucial and sometimes unexpected role in enabling activists to organize across difference and cohere around an identity that emphasized their multiple layers of vulnerability and responsibilization. Through images that reembedded natural disasters in their political and economic contexts, activists exposed their historic and ongoing abandonment by neoliberal policies and state failures. Ultimately, such abandonments forfeited coastal homeowners to a future marked by fiscal and climate crisis, constituting them as sacrificed citizens. And yet, I also propose that the struggles of sacrificed citizens offer new possibilities for coalitions and pluralisms.     

Internal spatial fix: China’s geographical solution to food supply and its limits

Over the past three decades, China has managed to maintain and even increase grain production in the context of rapid industrialization and urbanization through a process of internal spatial fix in which grain production is relocated to and concentrated in less developed inland regions. However, the fix created political and environmental problems that will undermine it in the future. Using national statistical data and two case studies, the paper demonstrates how the fix has been a result of complex interactions between central and local actors and is a key factor shaping China’s trajectories of food politics and agrarian transitions. It also reveals that confronting the underproduction crisis of food under capitalist accumulation China has first sought to produce sufficient grain within its national border rather than rely on overseas resources.     

Profit,reputation and ‘doing the right thing’: Convention theory and the problem of food waste in the UK retail sector

In 2014, Tesco – one of the world’s largest food retailers – revealed that it had generated almost 57,000 tonnes of food waste in its UK operations over the previous twelve-month period. This shocking statistic added to existing evidence of a significant environmental and social problem in the UK and across the world. This paper utilises convention theory to examine the role of major retailers in the context of this global problem and assesses their motivations for acting on food waste. Drawing on interviews with key stakeholders (including major retailers), the analysis investigates their main justifications for action on food waste. It finds that retailers mostly appealed to three conventions or ‘orders of worth’ (civic, market and opinion) and used these as a basis for their commitment to food waste reduction. We argue that the combination of these different justifications is feasible and necessary in the context of the retail sector but that they may also lead to some unintended consequences (in the retail sector and beyond). Crucially, we demonstrate how the dilution of civic justifications (by their financial and reputational counterparts) might produce negative outcomes and inaction as retailers attempt to adhere to the so-called ‘food waste hierarchy’. The paper highlights the continuing significance of convention theory as a framework for analysing possible responses to the social and environmental challenges confronting global agro-food systems.     

Problematising justice definitions in public food security debates: Towards global and participative food justices

In the current environment of austerity, social justice concerns are increasingly permeating the food security agenda. However, there is a need to clarify what it means to create socially just food systems conceptually and practically. To address this gap, this paper proposes an analytical framework to embed a more complex conceptualisation of justice in food security debates that also serves as a bridging device across competing narratives. This framework is mobilised to analyse the framing process of the UK media, which plays a key role in developing narratives that provide audiences with schemas for interpreting events. Results show the emergence of eleven frames which highlight different solutions to deliver food security. The application of the justice analytical framework evidences the contingent relationship between food security and justice claims and discusses how these food security frames address differently what counts as a matter of justice (including economic, socio-cultural and political dimensions) and who counts as a subject of justice, tackling issues around delimitation of scales and sites of justice. The analysis reveals polarised positions between whether the sites subject to justice should be individuals or structures and uncovers how political and global elements of justice are largely by-passed in food security debates. These conceptualisations of justice and associated policy recommendations neglect the potential for people to participate fully in the conditions and decisions that give rise to particular distributions of goods and bads in the first place; limiting the construction of shared responsibilities to deliver global and participative food justices.     

Mediating the spaces of diet and health: A critical analysis of reporting on nutrition and colorectal cancer in the UK

The media are one of the main arenas in which nutrition information is framed and developed. Research has shown a predominantly individualistic framing of diet-related health issues such as obesity, type-2 diabetes and coronary heart disease in international media coverage. These issues are framed as personal, ’lifestyle’ issues rather than requiring policy or structural change. In addition, research has shown a tendency in nutrition research and media coverage of it, to emphasize individual ingredients or components more than overall diet. The media have a tendency to report diet related research simplistically, often without contextualization. Taking a case study approach, this paper analyses UK news media coverage and framing of British Medical Journal (BMJ) published research into dietary fibre and bowel cancer risk. I investigate how the health issue fibre and bowel cancer is framed and dissect the process of mediation (from press release to mass media to local media), analysing the shifting ’geographies of responsibility’ that result. This paper argues that media coverage of research into diet and bowel cancer can be explained by the technologies, conventions and routines of media representation. Key gatekeepers were found to have an important role in framing the information that was reported. Taking a critical approach, this paper argues that like obesity, type 2 diabetes and coronary heart disease, coverage of nutritional means of preventing bowel cancer is set predominantly in the ’lifestyle’ frame, laying responsibility for increasing dietary fibre at the door of the individual rather than looking at broader social, economic, or political drivers of dietary change.     

Zoning in: The contributions of buyam–sellams to constructing Cameroon’s wild food zone

Studies of forests in Africa employ the term zone to denote a particular type of forested area. This limited usage speaks to a need for human geographers to pay more attention to elaborating and engaging with the concept of the zone. This article shows why human geography should pay the ‘zone’ more attention. Using Cameroon’s humid forest zone (HFZ) as a case study, the article focuses on how conceptual elaboration of the ‘zone’ can inform analyses of the food product trade in Cameroon. This trade is organized around various types of buyers and sellers (or buyam–sellam in pidgin), and offers a wide variety of wild products to Cameroon’s urban food consumers, including fruits and vegetables, game meat, condiments, medicinal plants, and fibers. Drawing on fieldwork surveys, interviews and focus groups in twenty-four markets of 203 buyam–sellams and 197 of their customers during the wet and dry seasons, this article analyzes narratives about Cameroon’s wild food zone. It ultimately shows what scholarly attention to the ‘zone’ offers in this case that other spatial concepts do not.     

Pudrición del Cogollo and the (post-)neoliberal ecological fix in Ecuador's palm oil industry

This paper examines the variegated natures of (post-)neoliberal environmental governance in Latin America using environmental crisis as an entry point. It examines the institutional measures put forth by Ecuador’s government, in concert with other actors, to contain and manage the damaging effects of an insidious palm oil plant disease known as Pudrición del Cogollo (PC). Using empirical data collected through qualitative means, my analysis demonstrates that nature’s biophysical processes – in particular, disease ecologies – can play a crucial role in the pursuit and achievement of national accumulation goals. Specifically, I argue that the ecologies of the PC crisis have been rendered functional to the Ecuadorian government’s current political and economic strategies of intensified accumulation and market competitiveness. By making environmental crisis the basis of key accumulation strategies, the state is able to convert negative environmental outcomes into opportunities for profit-generation. Utilizing the notion of the ‘ecological fix’, this paper reveals two major conclusions: (1) plant health emergencies and the actions used to mitigate environmental crises are not only challenges but opportunities that can be mobilized to support further accumulation strategies and (2) the study of PC and Ecuador’s palm oil industry provides new fruitful terrain to examine the connections between the deepening variegated effects of neoliberalism through nature and environmental crisis solutions in Latin America.     

Turn up the heat! Contesting energy poverty in Buffalo,NY

Energy poverty – or the condition of households that cannot adequately heat their homes – is produced at the confluence of multi-scalar processes, from regional labor market restructuring, to urban disinvestment, to geopolitical and geoeconomic struggles over extraction. Critical theorization of the concept is in its nascent phase and the notion itself has received relatively little attention in the United States. Our paper aims to address these lacunae by mobilizing an urban political ecology framework to consider a community-based campaign that targeted residential energy conservation funds in Buffalo, New York. We analyze how the community campaign drew upon the “network crisis” of the energy-poor home to frame critical justice demands that foregrounded energy poverty as the product of uneven socionatural development. Through spatial claims and scalar strategies, the campaign highlighted the contribution of neoliberal conservation programs to deepening patterns of uneven development, and demanded redress of disinvestment in urban housing stock through funding of weatherization for low-income households. We argue that contests over urban energy metabolism offer a fruitful area to explore the possibilities of transforming uneven development from below.     

Shifting production/shifting consumption: A political ecology of health perceptions in Kumaon,India

Despite rapid economic growth, India has not seen the improvements in food and nutritional security that other developing countries have had. This “Asian enigma” has generated a wealth of economistic analyses seeking to explain the persistence of poor nutrition, yet few studies have looked at everyday experiences of changing food systems, and how this impacts nutritional practices as well as the processes of subject formation. In this paper, I draw on qualitative research conducted in Uttarakhand, North India and examine how state-led shifts in agricultural production have resulted in changing food consumption practices and diminished perceptions of health. Villagers link this decreased health to increased chemicals in home-produced food, greater dependence on the market for food purchases, and generational changes in dietary preferences. Despite villagers’ cognizance of the negative health effects of these practices, they largely view these byproducts of capitalistic development with an air of inevitability. Following Mansfield (2011) this paper contributes to the political ecology of health literature by employing the concept of food as a “vector of intercorporeality” (Stassart and Whatmore, 2003:449) and bringing this into conversation with a poststructuralist understanding of subjectivity. I argue that within shifting landscapes of agriculture production and food consumption, notions of diminished health are indicative of the complex and always incomplete processes of subject formation. I view shifting health perceptions as intimate bodily resistances to agricultural development, and conclude that within agricultural development programs a focus on bodily health and well-being is a fecund platform for further experimental research that seeks to imagine development differently.     

Critical moments? Life transitions and energy biographies

Family and youth research has highlighted the importance of lifecourse transitions, illustrating how they can have a substantial impact on people’s everyday lives and anticipated futures. Given their apparent significance, it is surprising that relatively little attention has been paid to life transitions – particularly unexpected ones – to explore how they can impact upon everyday energy use. This is a central concern of Energy Biographies project. The project’s qualitative longitudinal design makes an original contribution, affording a detailed view of how transitions unfold and their significance for energy demand and environmental action. Central to elucidating these issues is the concept of ‘linked lives’, recognising that people live interdependently. In this paper, we explore the accounts of three participants who experienced one or more life transitions during the course of the project, in order to consider the impacts of these events (both planned and unanticipated) on their everyday energy use and environmental actions as part of their linked lives with others.     

Mediating good food and moments of possibility with Jamie Oliver: Problematising celebrity chefs as talking labels

This paper explores the powerful and mediating role of celebrity chefs over audience relationships with food through analysis of Jamie Oliver and his recent series Save with Jamie. The paper firstly situates the role of celebrity chefs theoretically, defining them as ‘talking labels’ who may act both as knowledge intermediaries and boundary objects to connect audiences with food in multiple ways. Here chefs actively construct and mediate discourses around ‘good food’. As trusted, credible, well-liked public figures, chefs step into out private home spaces through our televisions to convey food information in a charismatic, entertaining and accessible way. Like traditional food labels, chef’s words can be ‘sticky’ and take hold in public imaginations in a way that goes far beyond the capacity of food products labels. Yet the relationship between chefs and audiences is far from straightforward and so the paper secondly aims to explore how these talking labels are understood and ‘used’ by audiences in their everyday food practices. Drawing selectively from a large scale audience survey (n = 600) as well as the series, Save with Jamie, this paper reveals the different ways that audiences ‘talk back’ to chefs both positively and negatively to create moments of simultaneous possibility and resistance for audience relations with food. This revealed complex relationships between audiences, chefs and food. It also suggests that the powerful work on celebrity chefs functions as part of a new mediated mechanism within today’s food governance.     

Food porn,pro-anorexia and the viscerality of virtual affect: Exploring eating in cyberspace

By engaging with ‘pro-anorexia’ and ‘food porn’ on the Internet, this paper explores eating in cyberspace. Reflecting on the ways in which virtual, but affective, consumption is central to both food porn and pro-anorexia websites, the paper asks what the act of eating ‘triggers’ and produces, connects and displaces. It traces how eating in, and through, cyberspace shapes the biological materialities of bodies whilst also collapsing neat distinctions between offline and online worlds. Virtual vectors of spectating, salivating and digesting are disembodied and yet corporeal. Eating is seen to take place beyond and among bodies and to be dissipated both spatially and temporally. As such, cyberspace is outside and other to lived corporeality, and yet also folded into and productive of the intimate geographies and embodied subjectivities of everyday lives. As eating takes myriad forms across the de-materialised viscerality of the Internet, it also emerges as central to the production and ‘matter(ing)’ of cyberspace itself; this is (an) eating space in which what is eaten, by whom and with what bodies, perpetually shifts. Thus, seeking to contribute to geographical scholarship on affect and food, this paper engages with eating as both the subject of enquiry and also as a productive pathway into an interrogation of cyberspace and its place within the affective productions of the everyday. It suggests that this is a key site in which to explore the intimate socialities, materialities and biopolitics of food.     

Intergenerational dynamics and local development: Mining and the indigenous community in Chiu Chiu,El Loa Province,northern Chile

Water conflicts are a significant issue in northern Chile, especially when linked to neoliberal economic activities – mainly mining – on the lands of indigenous peoples. In fact, political ecology tends to accentuate the ways in which their communities unite around a water-based territoriality and/or cultural politics when faced with ‘threatening’ outsiders. However, internal differentiation has become especially relevant to enable a more nuanced appreciation of local struggles and claims. Taking a political ecology of water perspective, this article analyses in what ways Intergenerational Dynamics (hereafter IGDs) shape the way indigenous communities articulate their collective vision of development when dealing with mining companies. In addition, it examines to what extent IGDs shape the key elements that constitute different positions regarding territory, and also assesses how such dynamics reflect age-related traditional interests and cultural senses of identity and territoriality.     

‘They took our beads,it was a fair trade,get over it’: Settler colonial logics,racial hierarchies and material dominance in Canadian agriculture

Canada is in a liminal space, with renewed struggles for and commitments to indigenous land and food sovereignty on one hand, and growing capital interest in land governance and agriculture on the other. While neoliberal capital increasingly accumulates land-based control, settler-farming communities still manage much of Canada’s arable land. This research draws on studies of settler colonialism, racial hierarchy and othering to connect the ideological with the material forces of settler colonialism and show how material dominance is maintained through colonial logics and racially ordered narratives. Through in-depth interviews, I investigate how white settler farmers perceive and construct two distinctly ‘othered’ groups: Indigenous peoples and migrant farmers and farm workers. Further, I show the disparate role of land and labour in constructing each group, and specifically, the cultural and material benefits of these constructions for land-based settler populations. At the same time, settler colonial structures and logics remain reciprocally coupled to political conditions. For instance, contemporary neoliberalism in Canadian agriculture modifies settler colonial structures to be sure. I argue, however, that political economic analyses of land and food production in Canada (such as corporate concentration, land grabbing and farm consolidation) ought to better integrate the systemic forces of settler colonialism that have conditioned land access in the first place. Of course, determining who is able to access land—and thus, who is able to grow food—continues to be a territorial struggle. Thus, in order to shift these conditions we ought to examine how those with access and control have acquired and maintained it.     

New power relations served here: The growth of food banking in Chicago

While some non-profits have suffered under the political and economic pressures of neoliberal urban governance reform, others have emerged as important institutional players in local governance regimes. This article highlights how non-profits food banks in Chicago have commercialized in order to respond to increased demand, enhance their institutional independence from government, and reassert their local dominance in emergency food service delivery. From a food bank member agency perspective, the consolidation of food bank institutional power has produced new bureaucratic limitations, user fees, and increased competition. These shifts reveal the rise of metropolitan food banks as important players in neoliberal urban governance regimes, as they control the conceptualization of hunger, management of poverty, and organization of food distribution systems.     

Variegated capitalism,the Greek crisis and SYRIZA’s counter-neoliberalisation challenge

The objective of this critical review is twofold. Firstly, we intend to tackle a number of assumptions that view the Greek crisis as the result of a marked resistance to (neoliberal) structural reforms and the failure to engage constructively with the challenges of globalisation. Instead, we argue that Greece was set on a neoliberal trajectory much before the crisis erupted, and that it is precisely this sustained neoliberalisation process – rather than its absence – that lays behind much of Greece’s current troubles. Secondly, we attempt an assessment of the prospect that SYRIZA’s victory may be signalling the start of a counter-neoliberal mobilisation. Drawing on the work of Brenner and others, we identify four alternative scenarios – capitulation, divorce, compromise, transformation – and discuss their implications for Greece and the Eurozone.     

Embodied geographies of food,belonging and hope in multicultural Hamilton,Aotearoa New Zealand

This article focuses on embodied geographies of food, belonging and hope for a group of migrant women in the small city of Hamilton, Aotearoa New Zealand. We explore the complex nature of multiculturalism as it is produced via place and food-sharing. Interviews and cooking sessions with 11 migrant women in Hamilton, each from a different country, prompted a range of emotions highlighting the numerous ways in which migrant women feel that they belong, or do not belong, to their ‘old home’, and their ‘new home’. Furthermore, the sharing of food and feelings helps establish affective ties between women migrants – across ethnic differences – and to the place of Hamilton. These hopeful intercultural encounters – discussed and digested in kitchens – are moments of reciprocity and mutual recognition between ethnically and culturally ‘different’ women. This account provides a means of not only highlighting the difficulties that migrant women face, but also the possibilities of multicultural place sharing.     

Locating international REDD+ power relations: Debating forests and trees in international climate negotiations

The Reduction of Deforestation and Forest Degradation initiative (REDD+) was initially hailed widely as a smart and cost-effective way to mitigate climate change and has moved quickly compared to other strands of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations. Much of the initiative’s original appeal – and a good deal of subsequent controversy around it – relates to framing the world’s tropical forests as carbon sinks and compensating developing countries that manage to reverse or avoid deforestation. REDD+ negotiations can thus be seen a site where the standard divisions between Annex 1 and non-Annex 1 (‘developed’ and ‘developing’) were being challenged and interrogated by the negotiating parties and the broader network of actors around the climate regime. This article suggests that such complex and changing global governance policy fields need to be analysed as ‘places’ in their own right, populated by actors engaged in field-specific power relations that may not reflect international hierarchies or power relations manifested in other international settings. Based in a unique set of interviews supplemented by primary data analysis, this article unpacks the power relations of REDD+ negotiations by examining how those involved seek to assume competence, designate and recognize leadership, and shape outcomes. In tracing the dynamics of claiming competence, the ‘competition’ between two disciplinary milieus around forests as an international policy object and also delegates’ shifting between reliance on expert knowledge and political ‘know-how’ in the negotiations themselves are identified. To understand the politics of recognition – that is to have a claim to competence or position acknowledged by others – the perceived qualities and resources of recognized leadership are examined and the absence of global superpowers amongst REDD+ leadership is problematized and discussed. Finally, in terms of wielding influence over outcomes, the fate of two quite similar ideas – one that has become incorporated into REDD+ methodology and another that is failing to be – further illustrate how the field is marked by internal power practices and that not all actors are equally well-positioned to achieve desired outcomes.     

A no-camp policy: Interrogating informal settlements in Lebanon

As fewer refugees move into formal camps, what kinds of non-camp spaces are emerging and how does that challenge the ways in which we understand the management and politics of refuge? This paper seeks to shed light on this question through an analysis of informal settlements in Lebanon. The Syrian crisis has displaced millions of people, most of whom have moved into neighbouring countries such as Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. The Lebanese government, faced with a longer history of Palestinian camps and their militarization has refused to allow the establishment of official refugee camps for Syrians. As a result of this ‘no camp’ policy, Syrians are forced to either live in private rented accommodation in towns and cities throughout the country, or in informal settlements (ISes) built on private, often agricultural land. These informal settlements are built and developed through a complex assemblage of humanitarianism, hospitality, security, economic and political considerations. In this paper, I look at the physical and social spaces of informal settlements in the Bekaa Valley, Eastern Lebanon, examining how differential access to aid, support, security and tacit recognition by the state has led to variations amongst them. In doing so, I expose how an informalized response to the crisis through a system of deregulation is enabling refugee spaces to emerge that are visible, yet unrecognized, flexible, yet precarious. These spaces destabilize the city/camp dichotomy by drawing together elements of both. In engaging with debates on informality, the paper contributes to a growing critical literature on refugee geographies and seeks to expand beyond the reductive narratives of refugee camps, thereby offering insights into refugee futures in increasingly uncertain times.     

Constructing legitimacy without legality in long term exile: Comparing Western Sahara and Tibet

While scholars agree that political legitimacy, or the legitimacy to rule, is sought by governing authorities, the concept itself is often considered to be problematically vague. This article explores how the very ambiguity of the concept of legitimacy may make it ‘good to think with’. Calling into question two problematic assumptions in discussions of legitimacy—whether legitimacy is the prerogative of state authorities, and whether legality is a necessary basis from which to make claims for legitimacy—this article uses the cases of two exiled governing authorities, for Western Sahara and Tibet, to examine how legitimate government can be produced in the absence of full legality as a recognised sovereign state. Attending to similarities and differences between these governments-in-exile we trace the sources of political legitimacy in each case and the techniques through which legitimacy is constructed in exile. Key to this has been the enactment of forms of rational-legal authority, including the establishment of state-like bureaucracies, the provision of services to their diasporic populations and aspirations to develop democratic structures. With the latter presented as a strategy both of securing internal legitimacy and of being seen to adhere to international norms of ‘good governance’, legitimacy in these cases emerges not so much as an achieved status, but as a set of techniques of government. We conclude by reflecting on how liminality – both territorially in terms of displacement and legally in terms of lack of full recognition – can counter-intuitively provide creative grounds for producing legitimacy.