Contribution short abstract:

Taking the imagination as a key political participant in the struggle for more just and sustainable worlds, this paper aims to 'story' the sensuous atmospheres of everyday life in agriculture, making them visible as the very substance that socio-ecological, political, and economic formations take.

Contribution long abstract:

Taking the imagination as a key political participant in the struggle for a more just and sustainable world, this paper aims to 'story' the sensuous atmospheres of everyday life in agricultural practice, rendering them visible as the very substance that socio-ecological, political, and economic formations take. Drawing from sensuous (auto)ethnographic encounters on a farm in northern Italy, the paper asks: what kinds of stories are the ‘sensuous atmospheres’ of techno-industrial and alternative agricultural practices made of, what kinds of stories do they tell, and how might they help to imagine new horizons of possibility in the making of more sustainable food systems? Sensory ethnographic material is presented in the style of ‘sensuous scholarship’, where the fieldwork is simultaneously analysed and evocatively storied as a strategy of making visible the sensuous atmospheres of contrasting agricultural foodways formations, through examples of encounters in peach orchards and wheat fields. The paper concludes by suggesting that the storying of sensuous atmospheres is a strategy to precipitate new horizons of imagining—in food systems and beyond—how the world can be made otherwise.