Journal
AGRICULTURE AND HUMAN VALUES
Volume 30, Issue 4, Pages 629-639Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s10460-013-9437-7
Keywords
Civil labor; Community supported agriculture; Liquid leisure; Co-production
Funding
- Connected Communities Programme [AH/1507612/1]
- Arts and Humanities Research Council [AH/I507612/1] Funding Source: researchfish
- AHRC [AH/I507612/1] Funding Source: UKRI
Ask authors/readers for more resources
In this paper we seek to understand the interplay between increasingly widely held concerns about the hegemony of industrialized agriculture and the emergence of counter-hegemonic activities, such as membership of community supported agriculture (CSA) initiatives. Informed by Blackshaw's (Leisure, Abingdon, Routledge, 2010) work on liquid leisure, we offer a new leisure-based conceptualization of the tactics of counter-hegemony, arguing in the process that food politics offers a rich site for new, transitional identity formation. Using a case study of a well-established community farm in southeast England, we demonstrate how the community members devote themselves to transient and inconsequential activities as a means of attempting to realize a larger self-related identity project. We also demonstrate how the seemingly close inter-personal bonds typical of CSA may not reflect the permanence accorded to them, with members able willingly to leave these communities once they can no longer progress their identity project. We conclude by arguing that our findings are emblematic of society in transition, with people moving well beyond the work/leisure activity into a world in which they embody the idea and the practice of being an active co-producer-in our case, of food. While recognizing that this does not necessarily mean that there is simple causality between practice and identity formation, we do argue that there is evidence of an increasing relationship between activity, time, and the performance of a new form of civil labor practice.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available