The Politics and Political Possibilities of Alternative Food Movements

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 while others have suggested alternative food movements might reinforce exploitative labour conditions or reaffirm the unequal distribution of land and wealth. 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 possible political futures such movements enable.

Keynotes 

Wednesday September 13: 10.00-17.00
15.15 - Keynote by David Boarder Giles (Deakin University, Australia)

Thursday September 14: 10.00-17.00
15.15 - Keynote by Birgit Müller (École des Hautes Études en Sciences 
Sociales, France)

Friday September 15: 10.00-15.30
13.45 - Keynote by Brad Weiss  (College of William and Mary, USA)

Here