Farmers, Food, Future, livre ebook

Offers important insights to fill a gap in the literature on social movements and experiences of alternative food networks.

Links sociological research communities and offers a fresh and comprehensive look at the possibilities and limits of transformative agency.

The global industrial food system contributes not only to environmental degradation, but also to multiple forms of nutritional harm and social inequalities. Despite numerous good reasons to fundamentally transform the sector, contemporary debates among practitioners, policy makers and scholars are marked by conflict over the direction of such transformation.

Focusing on Germany, Schoppek analyses the transformative potential of strategic agency in advancing social-ecological alternatives to industrialised capitalism within the agricultural sector. The book compares three initiatives that pursue distinct visions and strategies of reform, innovation, and resistance: a farmers’ interest group, a large agricultural cooperative, and an activist-led field occupation.

Drawing on these case studies, the analysis provides insight into the conditions under which transformative change emerges or fails to emerge, and the challenges of alliance building for a more just and resilient food system.

Chapters 6 and 7 available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

Foreword: Contested Imperial Mode of Eating by Ulrich Brand

Preface: Food for Thought

Part I: Starters

1. Conceptual Toolbox: Transformation and Transformative Agency

2. Mapping the Agrarian Landscape: Structures, Crises, and Conflicts

Part II: Main Course

3. Reforming the Field: The Symbiotic Strategy

4. Innovating the Field: The Prefigurative Strategy

5. Occupying the Field: The Ruptural Strategy

6 .Transforming the Field of Struggle: Towards a Social-Ecological Hegemony

Part III: Dessert

7. Conclusion: Alliances and a Strategic Division of Labour