| Diverse methodologies of care: Thinking with and practising (soil) in situated, affective and enactive ways This research article outlines a provocation for diverse and experimentally open, situated approaches to exploring care and caring. The diversely positioned authors discuss this idea using the subject of soil, in the place and context of Aotearoa New Zealand. Little is known about the diversity of ways that everyday people value, or, have caring relationships for/with soil, among a plethora of research that positions soil ‘care’ around, for example, commercial food production, waste-sinking, or property land value. To study diverse care in relation to soil, as with many relational subjects, requires equivalent diversity in the ways in which we might explore it. Here we outline the basis for diverse, situated methodologies that necessarily lead to a diversity of methods. This paper looks at the methodological imperatives that lead to exploring care, and discusses a variety of methods that generate different forms of ‘data’ with different forms of representation of that care. We observe that to holistically observe care relations with soil requires a diversity of methodologies, inherently ontological and epistemological – worldmaking. We discuss situated and enactive, affective approaches of Kaupapa Māori enquiry, monitoring and arts-based approaches to ‘measure’ soil care taking place, in place, and contextualise this with our own author positionality. We discuss this suite of experimental, reflexive, affective and responsive ways to measure soil care that are contingent on that being cared about, for, with and by, and which reciprocally give care. |
| Emerging transitions in organic waste infrastructure in Aotearoa New Zealand Aotearoa New Zealand is at a critical juncture in reducing and managing organic waste. Research has highlighted the significant proportion of organic waste sent to landfills and associated adverse effects such as greenhouse gas emissions and loss of valuable organic matter. There is current debate about what practices and infrastructure to invest in to better manage and use organic waste. We highlight the diversity of existing organic waste practices and infrastructures, focusing on Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. We show how debates about organic waste practices and infrastructure connect across three themes: waste subjectivities, collective action in place and language. |
| Diverse values of surplus for a community economy of fish(eries) This paper develops a diverse economies account of fish ‘waste’ that revalues it as ‘surplus’. We examine ‘Kai Ika’, a community marine conservation experiment in Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland), Aotearoa New Zealand. Kai Ika rescues fish heads, frames and offal that were previously ‘going to waste’ and redistributes them to fish eaters who would otherwise struggle to access these foods. It involves fishers and community sector and Indigenous actors in an initiative that converts would-be waste into surplus. We examine the case as a diverse economic project that nourishes humans, enhances respect for fish as living beings, and potentially conserves marine resources in the face of global-to-local fisheries depletion. The research is based on community-gathered fish parts collection data, and virtual and email interview data. We analyse this data to produce an account of diverse ‘object values’ and fish-related surpluses that derive from surplus labour and other socio-cultural and environmental surplus. We argue that reframing fish economies in this way encourages new and diverse economic subjectivities and a more connected, relational and cooperative community economy of fish. |
| Food for People in Place: Reimagining Resilient Food Systems for Economic Recovery The COVID-19 pandemic and associated response have brought food security into sharp focus for many New Zealanders. The requirement to “shelter in place” for eight weeks nationwide, with only “essential services” operating, affected all parts of the New Zealand food system. The nationwide full lockdown highlighted existing inequities and created new challenges to food access, availability, affordability, distribution, transportation, and waste management. While Aotearoa New Zealand is a food producer, there remains uncertainty surrounding the future of local food systems, particularly as the long-term effects of the pandemic emerge. In this article we draw on interviews with food rescue groups, urban farms, community organisations, supermarket management, and local and central government staff to highlight the diverse, rapid, community-based responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings reveal shifts at both the local scale, where existing relationships and short supply chains have been leveraged quickly, and national scale, where funding has been mobilised towards a different food strategy. We use these findings to re-imagine where and how responsibility might be taken up differently to enhance resilience and care in diverse food systems in New Zealand. |
| Care-fully enacting diverse foodworlds in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand |
| Assembling disruptive practice in the neoliberal university: an ethics of care We document and interrogate our collective experimentation with disruptive academic practices as early- and mid-career women researchers in Aotearoa New Zealand. We grapple with our disruptions and attempted interventions to do academic work differently. We find that, in our efforts to resist, and attempts to promote different norms within a neoliberal university setting, we exercise a commitment to care: for colleagues, students, our friends, families and selves. This ethic of care emerged as we interrogated our gendered experiences in a set of experimental interventions designed to disrupt gendered neoliberal practices. These interventions – the formation of a national Women and Gender Geographies Research Network (2013), an interactive seminar (2015), and a panel session at the New Zealand Geographical Society Conference (2016) – generated different experiences of living, working, and relating in academic spaces. In productively disrupting, we learned the value of collectives to generate momentum and build solidarity, and the importance of creating safe spaces for sharing experiences. Our experiments emphasize that mutual trust, especially within our collective, is critical to progress. The interventions’ generative work privileged other forms of labour and fostered an active and equitable (knowledge) community in which practices of care for diverse academic communities and ourselves were paramount. |
| (Re)assembling foodscapes with the Crowd Grown Feast This paper uses an assemblage framework to examine the Crowd Grown Feast, an “alternative food initiative” that engaged 100 participants in a collective food growing and eating event in Auckland's city centre. Assemblage thinking here derives from the intersecting theoretical and political interests of multiplicity and uncertainty. It offers a generative framework for a feminist ethnography concerned with the transformative potential of actually existing practices. Studying the case of the Crowd Grown Feast within this framework allows us to explore tensions in agrifood scholarship created by the challenge issued to dominant traditions of political economy by recent relational accounts of alternative foods, “food bodies” and affect. I challenge the terms of contemporary debates around food provisioning in this way. The case highlights the multiple relations that animate and constitute conventional categories. It confirms that binary categories such as producer/consumer, urban/rural, conventional/alternative, and good/bad foods are misrepresentative by nature of the blurred boundaries between them, and suggests that they might be better understood as assemblages of emergent relations among multiple subjects and objects. This way of thinking and doing research is much needed in critical food geography as a platform for imagining and practising food differently. |
| Food fights: irritating for social change among Auckland's alternative food initiatives This article explores alternative food initiatives (AFI) and their performances of benign transgression. Through collaborative activist-and-academic-storytelling we tease apart the divergent practices of AFIs to question what mediates these performances in the grey area between conventional and alternative practice. Grounded examples of AFIs performing alternative economy and related acts of ‘irritant’ civil disobedience show how subverting normative practices of power and authority can catalyse social reproduction of difference, and tangibly alter the conventional food system. |
| Alternative framings of alternative food: A typology of practice ‘Alternative’ food initiatives (AFIs) are often interpreted as political movements, constructed as defiant alternatives to industrial agri‐food relations, and represented by a performance of singular alterity. This understanding of alternative collapses into a mere politics of identity, criticised in the literature for its oversimplification. In this paper, we utilise an established methodological framework that retains AFI diversity, to create a novel typology of AFIs by diverse and embodied practice rather than animating political project. In doing so, we point to the political potential for AFIs to ‘do’ food otherwise and make different worlds. |
