After years of silence on municipal food policy in Berlin, actors from civil society, academia, i... more After years of silence on municipal food policy in Berlin, actors from civil society, academia, industry and the local senate have come together to discuss the current state and future of Berlin’s food system, and are developing the city’s first urban food strategy. The Ernahrungsrat Berlin is the citizen-led urban food policy council working towards food democracy and re-localisation in the Berlin-Brandenburg region.
Gleaning, the practice of harvesting surplus crops at their source, has taken place for hundreds ... more Gleaning, the practice of harvesting surplus crops at their source, has taken place for hundreds of years. The persistence of gleaning, alongside market-based forms of food provisioning, is an opportunity to examine how the food surplus of capitalist and feudal food economies can be appropriated for other uses, and support diverse economic practices. Presently, gleaning happens in informal and organized ways, and has long been a part of food security efforts in Europe and North America. Attention to the global scandal of food waste has generated increased support for gleaning efforts. This chapter examines the history of gleaning, the laws that support gleaning, and the post-capitalist ‘afterlives’ of gleaned food in a contemporary food sharing enterprise. Reflecting on these histories, the chapter makes a case for re-embedding gleaning practices in the commons.
Abstract The production of nature has been employed to theorize shifts in nature-society relation... more Abstract The production of nature has been employed to theorize shifts in nature-society relations that have accompanied historical transformations in production and social reproduction. While Marxist scholars have employed this framework to theorize the nature-society relations that accompany capitalist production, they have paid less attention to those that accompany non-capitalist production. In the meantime critical food studies has grown abundant with more-than-human and more-than-capitalist encounters with nature. This paper attempts to bring these two streams of thought together, in order to explore what they reveal about encounters and entanglements with microbes and non-human labor in the non-capitalist production of yogurt. Drawing on ethnographic research with a yogurt making cooperative in Somerville, Massachusetts, USA, I explore the contribution of microbial labor to the co-production of nature and post-human ethics in a cooperative food enterprise.
Public fridges are open-access community-stewarded spaces where food can be freely and anonymousl... more Public fridges are open-access community-stewarded spaces where food can be freely and anonymously shared. As such, they are fertile ground for understanding the obstacles and opportunities for governing food as a commons. This paper examines the governance strategies that have developed within and around Foodsharing.de, a grassroots food-rescue network in Berlin, to manage food as a commons. Analyzing the commoning of food in Foodsharing.de provides a novel entry point into the multi-scalar and multi-stakeholder governance processes that shape our broader food system. In this paper, I further develop the concept of urban food commons to specifically analyze the governance of food and risk. In particular, I draw on qualitative research to analyze a conflict between Foodsharing.de and the Berlin Food Safety Authority over the potential health and safety risks of public fridges. Building on this, I show how different governance practices, informed by different risk ontologies and understandings of the common good/hazard of food, come into tension through the everyday practices of sharing food. This paper departs from previous research that has focused on how the benefits of food commons are shared and regulated at various scales, to also explore how their risks are managed, or could be managed, within an urban food commons framework.
The Internet is growing in popularity as a research site and is often framed as the next frontier... more The Internet is growing in popularity as a research site and is often framed as the next frontier in human subjects research. The opportunities the Internet provides for political organizing, making personal experiences more public, and creating spaces for a variety of voices makes it particularly relevant to feminist geographers and researchers such as ourselves. However, many qualitative researchers approach online research as though the Internet simply archives an abundance of data that is ‘there for the taking.’ Being trained in feminist research methods, we took issue with this approach, yet also encountered challenges when trying to apply feminist practices and ethical perspectives to online research environments. We explore these challenges through a collaborative reflection on our own independent online research experiences. Three themes emerge: (1) interpreting politics and visibility in online spaces, (2) researcher positionality across virtual and material study sites, and (3) subjectivity and power in online research ethics. Reflecting on these themes, we argue that the insights of feminist ethics and a feminist geographical lens are crucial for bringing much-needed reflexivity and reciprocity into online research. Simultaneously, online research opens up exciting new ways of conceptualizing central ideas within feminist research ethics, including politicization, positionality, and power.
Households and community organizations are involved in the creation, use, care, and management of... more Households and community organizations are involved in the creation, use, care, and management of urban spaces, including through food practices such as planting, foraging, harvesting, weeding and pruning at the ambiguous edges of public and private property. Drawing on case studies in Boston, Massachusetts, we examine how commons are articulated through these practices, particularly in relation to multiple dimensions of property rights. Specifically, we ask how food practices can open urban spaces to negotiations around access, responsibility, care, and ownership, especially when (property) ownership is not an end-goal, but a circumstance shaping other practices. Using interviews and participant observation of individuals and organizations involved in urban food provisioning, we explore how households and community organizations are interrupting fixed notions of property ownership, by practicing urban commons. These practices and negotiations demonstrate ongoing shifts in the meanings of urban space with flexible understandings of property and ownership.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Dec 21, 2021
Compost is seen as black gold among food producers. However, the process of creating, distributin... more Compost is seen as black gold among food producers. However, the process of creating, distributing, and using compost in an urban setting has received limited attention within the social sciences broadly and within geography in particular. This is despite an increasingly robust realm of waste and discard studies within the academy (Davies,
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
Compost is seen as black gold among food producers. However, the process of creating, distributin... more Compost is seen as black gold among food producers. However, the process of creating, distributing, and using compost in an urban setting has received limited attention within the social sciences broadly and within geography in particular. This is despite an increasingly robust realm of waste and discard studies within the academy (Davies,
Given profound urban challenges amplified by COVID-19, we need to center anti-racist feminists' l... more Given profound urban challenges amplified by COVID-19, we need to center anti-racist feminists' lenses on care, commoning, and collectivity in our cultivations and analyses of urban change. We join a chorus of feminists who critique the devaluation, erasure, and isolation of care in the cities that we build and the stories we tell about them. But this is well-traversed territory, the 'me too' tale of every feminist who dreamsa different city or kind of urban theory. So, we outline a research agenda rooted in intersectional feminist imaginations and transformations that live around us. Neither nomadic nor confined to the home, care, commoning and collectivity can be aspirational, spatial, and practical. Inspired by Dolores Hayden and intersectional feminists, we ask: What kinds of socio-spatial imaginations can produce just, sustainable cities and who makes them? What material practices enable social change and improve everyday life, and at what scales might struggles for just cities be waged? ARTICLE HISTORY
After years of silence on municipal food policy in Berlin, actors from civil society, academia, i... more After years of silence on municipal food policy in Berlin, actors from civil society, academia, industry and the local senate have come together to discuss the current state and future of Berlin’s food system, and are developing the city’s first urban food strategy. The Ernahrungsrat Berlin is the citizen-led urban food policy council working towards food democracy and re-localisation in the Berlin-Brandenburg region.
Gleaning, the practice of harvesting surplus crops at their source, has taken place for hundreds ... more Gleaning, the practice of harvesting surplus crops at their source, has taken place for hundreds of years. The persistence of gleaning, alongside market-based forms of food provisioning, is an opportunity to examine how the food surplus of capitalist and feudal food economies can be appropriated for other uses, and support diverse economic practices. Presently, gleaning happens in informal and organized ways, and has long been a part of food security efforts in Europe and North America. Attention to the global scandal of food waste has generated increased support for gleaning efforts. This chapter examines the history of gleaning, the laws that support gleaning, and the post-capitalist ‘afterlives’ of gleaned food in a contemporary food sharing enterprise. Reflecting on these histories, the chapter makes a case for re-embedding gleaning practices in the commons.
Abstract The production of nature has been employed to theorize shifts in nature-society relation... more Abstract The production of nature has been employed to theorize shifts in nature-society relations that have accompanied historical transformations in production and social reproduction. While Marxist scholars have employed this framework to theorize the nature-society relations that accompany capitalist production, they have paid less attention to those that accompany non-capitalist production. In the meantime critical food studies has grown abundant with more-than-human and more-than-capitalist encounters with nature. This paper attempts to bring these two streams of thought together, in order to explore what they reveal about encounters and entanglements with microbes and non-human labor in the non-capitalist production of yogurt. Drawing on ethnographic research with a yogurt making cooperative in Somerville, Massachusetts, USA, I explore the contribution of microbial labor to the co-production of nature and post-human ethics in a cooperative food enterprise.
Public fridges are open-access community-stewarded spaces where food can be freely and anonymousl... more Public fridges are open-access community-stewarded spaces where food can be freely and anonymously shared. As such, they are fertile ground for understanding the obstacles and opportunities for governing food as a commons. This paper examines the governance strategies that have developed within and around Foodsharing.de, a grassroots food-rescue network in Berlin, to manage food as a commons. Analyzing the commoning of food in Foodsharing.de provides a novel entry point into the multi-scalar and multi-stakeholder governance processes that shape our broader food system. In this paper, I further develop the concept of urban food commons to specifically analyze the governance of food and risk. In particular, I draw on qualitative research to analyze a conflict between Foodsharing.de and the Berlin Food Safety Authority over the potential health and safety risks of public fridges. Building on this, I show how different governance practices, informed by different risk ontologies and understandings of the common good/hazard of food, come into tension through the everyday practices of sharing food. This paper departs from previous research that has focused on how the benefits of food commons are shared and regulated at various scales, to also explore how their risks are managed, or could be managed, within an urban food commons framework.
The Internet is growing in popularity as a research site and is often framed as the next frontier... more The Internet is growing in popularity as a research site and is often framed as the next frontier in human subjects research. The opportunities the Internet provides for political organizing, making personal experiences more public, and creating spaces for a variety of voices makes it particularly relevant to feminist geographers and researchers such as ourselves. However, many qualitative researchers approach online research as though the Internet simply archives an abundance of data that is ‘there for the taking.’ Being trained in feminist research methods, we took issue with this approach, yet also encountered challenges when trying to apply feminist practices and ethical perspectives to online research environments. We explore these challenges through a collaborative reflection on our own independent online research experiences. Three themes emerge: (1) interpreting politics and visibility in online spaces, (2) researcher positionality across virtual and material study sites, and (3) subjectivity and power in online research ethics. Reflecting on these themes, we argue that the insights of feminist ethics and a feminist geographical lens are crucial for bringing much-needed reflexivity and reciprocity into online research. Simultaneously, online research opens up exciting new ways of conceptualizing central ideas within feminist research ethics, including politicization, positionality, and power.
Households and community organizations are involved in the creation, use, care, and management of... more Households and community organizations are involved in the creation, use, care, and management of urban spaces, including through food practices such as planting, foraging, harvesting, weeding and pruning at the ambiguous edges of public and private property. Drawing on case studies in Boston, Massachusetts, we examine how commons are articulated through these practices, particularly in relation to multiple dimensions of property rights. Specifically, we ask how food practices can open urban spaces to negotiations around access, responsibility, care, and ownership, especially when (property) ownership is not an end-goal, but a circumstance shaping other practices. Using interviews and participant observation of individuals and organizations involved in urban food provisioning, we explore how households and community organizations are interrupting fixed notions of property ownership, by practicing urban commons. These practices and negotiations demonstrate ongoing shifts in the meanings of urban space with flexible understandings of property and ownership.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Dec 21, 2021
Compost is seen as black gold among food producers. However, the process of creating, distributin... more Compost is seen as black gold among food producers. However, the process of creating, distributing, and using compost in an urban setting has received limited attention within the social sciences broadly and within geography in particular. This is despite an increasingly robust realm of waste and discard studies within the academy (Davies,
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
Compost is seen as black gold among food producers. However, the process of creating, distributin... more Compost is seen as black gold among food producers. However, the process of creating, distributing, and using compost in an urban setting has received limited attention within the social sciences broadly and within geography in particular. This is despite an increasingly robust realm of waste and discard studies within the academy (Davies,
Given profound urban challenges amplified by COVID-19, we need to center anti-racist feminists' l... more Given profound urban challenges amplified by COVID-19, we need to center anti-racist feminists' lenses on care, commoning, and collectivity in our cultivations and analyses of urban change. We join a chorus of feminists who critique the devaluation, erasure, and isolation of care in the cities that we build and the stories we tell about them. But this is well-traversed territory, the 'me too' tale of every feminist who dreamsa different city or kind of urban theory. So, we outline a research agenda rooted in intersectional feminist imaginations and transformations that live around us. Neither nomadic nor confined to the home, care, commoning and collectivity can be aspirational, spatial, and practical. Inspired by Dolores Hayden and intersectional feminists, we ask: What kinds of socio-spatial imaginations can produce just, sustainable cities and who makes them? What material practices enable social change and improve everyday life, and at what scales might struggles for just cities be waged? ARTICLE HISTORY
Uploads
Papers by Oona Morrow