Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

The conflict between modern and alternative food systems, such as regen ag, can be usefully understood as a struggle for a different kind of infrastructure. I illustrate how regen ag practitioners and thinkers seek to a food system which reproduces itself through infrastructures of emplacement.

Paper long abstract

Modern food systems seek to override socio-ecological place-specificity; alternative food movements seek to preserve it. Drawing on Mario Blaser’s recent work (2025), I argue that this central conflict can be usefully understood as a struggle for a different kind of infrastructure.

Blaser proposes that modernity spreads through infrastructures of displacement – material and immaterial practices which override the specificity of places, and which produce extractivist relations. In contrast, infrastructures of emplacement are those which ground (a) people in specific places, and which produce relations of reciprocity. Indigenous ways of being offer examples of infrastructures of emplacement. However, how to build such practices of emplacement from within modern societies, for example within alternative food movements?

In this paper, I share early findings from an ongoing research project on cultivating emplacement in regenerative agriculture. Bottom-up regen ag initiatives seek to enable farmers (and the broader agri-food networks) to perceive and respond to place’s diversity and complexity so as to regenerate human and more-than-human life. This situates regen ag openly against modern industrial farming (including corporate regen ag), which seeks to pacify and silence socio-ecological place-specificity. As the European Alliance for Regenerative Agriculture writes (2026) “regeneration is not a prescription; it is a contextually intelligent response”. What does this mean in practice? I draw on ethnographic and qualitative research to illustrate how regen ag practitioners and thinkers seek to build individual and systemic practices of place-based response-ability: a food system which reproduces itself through infrastructures of emplacement.