EEI SEMINAR:“Alternative Entanglements: Understanding the construction and sustaining of farmer trainings in the U.S. as a solution to the farming crisis” by Lucía Argüelles

EEI SEMINAR: “Alternative Entanglements: Understanding the construction and sustaining of farmer trainings in the U.S. as a solution to the farming crisis”



Speaker: Lucía Argüelles, ICTA-UAB

Moderator: Isabelle Anguelovski, ICTA-UAB

Day: Wednesday, April 25th

Time: 12.30h

Room: Z/022

This paper contributes to debates about the potential of alternative food networks and their contradictions using sustainability-oriented farmer trainings as case study. I provide an empirical account of the imaginaries and structures at play in the construction of farmer trainings as a solution to the farming crisis, as well as the possibilities and tensions herein. I argue that the imaginary around lack of farmers embedded on the trainings is white and comes from privileged logics and rationales about farming. On the ground, this imaginary is sustained by philanthropism and consumption elitism. Moreover, the trainings are an outcome of neoliberal governance arrangements, such as the NGOization of farming and the responsibilization of farmers by farming hero logics, under which farmers are hold responsible for their success despite the unfavourable conditions. I finally call for a broader and non-binary vision to alternatives, in which political ecology perspectives brings relevant insights.

Bio

Lucía Argüelles is a PhD candidate (4th year) at ICTA, under the supervision of Isabelle Anguelovski. She is studying the role of power and privilege on the construction of alternatives (spaces, initiatives or organizations to which some sort of difference is attached in relation to a mainstream Other) and in turn, how the expansion and institutionalization of an alternative strategy for social change (encouraging the creation of alternatives with the aspiration of increasingly provoke positive social transformation) might contribute to the reproduction of power and privilege. In particular, she is looking at the imaginaries, rationalities, narratives as well as material realities embedded on community economies and on different forms of alternative food networks.