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- Convenors:
-
Sandra Patricia Gonzalez-Santos
(Independent Researcher)
Leandro Rodriguez-Medina (Universidad Alberto Hurtado)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
Can we change the way things are assembled? Can we place high-standards of well-being as the organizing logic? We invite reflections on how self-managed social movements are re-signifying their work as a craft, how they are building communities of care and how they are growing by doing so.
Long Abstract:
STS has a long tradition of studying how different ways of assembling things make them (ontologically) different. The assemblages that make up our reality are the product of associations that always transcend the intentions of those who designed and manufactured them. With this in mind, we invite people to explore how particular efforts that envision and enact different ways of assembling things give rise to different social relations. We draw on preliminary work being done around self-managed social movements that are attempting to change the way things are done within the arts, food systems, healthcare and environmental projects. These movements believe transformation is possible. They seek to bring their practice back to a human scale while placing (more than human) life at the center. They envision ways of promoting high-standards of well-being and revaluing their work as a craft. We are interested in studying if and how these transformations trickle over and wave out into policy, into the market, into language, and into the bodies of people. Do these transformations end up inscribed in policy? Do they creating new traditions? What sort of community are they creating and how are these communities tying into other communities? What sort of care practices and governing practices are being created and used? What is the role of materiality in these alternative assemblages?
We welcome empirical and conceptual reflections, following diverse theoretical and methodological frameworks, since our goal is to find areas of convergence but also substantive differences between the experiences analyzed.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Sarah Wandia (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Long abstract:
This contribution aims to explore existing online social communities & movements in Kenya and how their organisation promotes sustained offline action. It examines online social platforms as tools that can be repurposed to empower the collective human experience by shifting the focus in scholarship from narratives of systemic failures/oppression to narratives of resilience. The objective is to reimagine, rediscover, and inspire new ways of making and doing social activism to facilitate material life within radically unjust systems. What happens when these organising strategies are inspired by a hope ethic firmly rooted in joy as radical resistance?
Drawing on this, the paper proposes an alternative logic of “Ujamaa Mtandaoni,” which translates to extended-family online in Kiswahili. This framework is grounded in community, human well-being, justice, indigenous epistemologies, and “Digital Alchemy” (Bailey, 2021). It aims to subvert online platforms founded on logics of wealth accumulation, dispossession, extractivism & obfuscation a lá Surveillance Capitalism by reclaiming them as instruments for personal and communal transformation.
We examine movements such as #nuNairobi, #KOT, and mental health online peer support groups in Kenya as examples that embody Ujamaa Mtandaoni. We pay close attention to the logic(s) in action that shape formation of these communities, and the existing “social algorithms” on the ground, e.g. language like Sheng slang, mutual aid practices and creatives’ collectives. How do these social networks challenge existing extractive logics to inspire generative models? Which critical insights emerge that might be used to propose/design liberatory prototypes for the future, e.g. policy, technological objects, art?
Cristina Grasseni (University of Leiden)
Short abstract:
Collective food procurement networks in European cities produce a shared language and imagery about food sustainability, health, and urban inclusion. However these voyages of self-transformation get seldom inscribed in policy and have so far failed to change food systems’ markets and politics.
Long abstract:
This paper explores how “different ways of assembling things give rise to different social relations”, as per the panel call, with reference to urban food systems. Building on the ERC-funded project ‘Food Citizens?’ (www.foodcitizens.eu), the paper will show how different Collective Food Procurement Networks (CFPN) address the scale of their practices, and how and if they could be considered “self-managed social movements”. The ways they value and approach volunteer work, crafting food, and gardening skills also implies considerations of solidarity and diversity among and within their networks. The project’s i-doc (https://www.foodcitizens.eu/idoc/) allows navigating fifty case studies in Poland, the Netherlands and Italy (in the cities of Gdansk, Rotterdam and Turin) to juxtapose and contrast what kind of communities CFPNs create and how they relate and compare with each other. This paper will add the PI’s insights from ethnographic fieldwork personally conducted in the Netherlands, to consider how self-managing, craft, and social participation go hand in hand in discourses of sustainability, focusing in particular on individual and collective bodies and health, and more-than-human life and well-being. Defining an appropriate scale and pace includes, among the ‘new traditions’ created, as suggested by the panel call, a rediscovered celebration of taste, artisanship, and pleasure in food preparation and conviviality, where the materiality of food, tools, spaces, and rhythms plays an important part. Less so though, do CFPN impact sustainability politics. The market, and global (food) economies remain the orthodox frame of reference for policy-making and for the management of organizations.
Sandra Patricia Gonzalez-Santos (Independent Researcher)
Long abstract:
Our relationship with food needs a profound and lasting change directed towards a more just, sustainable, sovereign and secure system, one looking beyond consumer interests, capitalist logics of efficiency and revenue. Awareness of this need is no longer enough, we need to find ways and opportunities to act and foster change. In this panel we share the outcomes of a collaborative action-research project motivated by Mexico's problematic social fabric, intended to experiment with ways to start, guide, sustain and promote these changes. The project was carried out in collaboration with first semester students enrolled in the Nutrition Science bachelor degree at a private elite university in Mexico City.
Considering our limited, restricted and obstructed view of the food-system and the food-scape we belong to and eat from, we developed ethnographic and auto-ethnographic exercises aim at helping us to see our connections with the people who produce, distribute, process and prepare the food we eat, and to help us contrast our personal food-scape and food-system, with that of the university and of Mexico. These exercises included mapping out our food-scapes (e.g. our home, our fridges and the university), storytelling our food preferences, and tastings (e.g. salts, tomatoes, nuts, dried fruits, honeys). We believe these exercises helped us to become aware of these connections and contrasts, and they have given us options to enact small but profound changes in these systems.