ABSTRACT
Recent agri-food studies, including commodity systems, the political economy of agriculture, regional development, and wider examinations of the rural dimension in economic geography and rural sociology have been confronted by three challenges. These can be summarized as: ‘more than human’ approaches to economic life; a ‘post-structural political economy’ of food and agriculture; and calls for more ‘enactive’, performative research approaches.
This volume describes the genealogy of such approaches, drawing on the reflective insights of more than five years of international engagement and research. It demonstrates the kinds of new work being generated under these approaches and provides a means for exploring how they should be all understood as part of the same broader need to review theory and methods in the study of food, agriculture, rural development and economic geography. This radical collective approach is elaborated as the Biological Economies approach. The authors break out from traditional categories of analysis, reconceptualising materialities, and reframing economic assemblages as biological economies, based on the notion of all research being enactive or performative.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part 1|166 pages
Re-making knowledges of agri-food
chapter 2|14 pages
Biological economies and processes of consumption
chapter 3|14 pages
The borderlands of animal disease
chapter 4|16 pages
Re-shaping ‘soft gold'
chapter 7|14 pages
Materialising taste
chapter 8|18 pages
Enactive encounters with the Langstroth hive
chapter 11|13 pages
Eating the unthinkable
chapter 12|17 pages
Enacting BAdairying as a system of farm practices in New Zealand
part 2|84 pages
Enacting new politics of knowledge