Jacob Smessaert defended his PhD thesis

On 13 September 2024 Jacob Smessaert successfully defended his PhD thesis titled ‘Practising democracy in agrifood collectives: building political communities in-against-and-beyond capitalism and the state’.

Abstract. This thesis sets out to analyse how democratic praxis in grassroots agrifood collectives contributes to the fostering of sustainability transformations that take a critical stance towards capitalism and the state. Exploring these types of transformations is relevant because the social-ecological, political, and economic structures of capitalism and the state constrain the depth and scope of the transformations necessary to assure and sustain the material and political possibility for egalitarian, more-than human collective futures. For this analysis, I focus on the democratic praxis of grassroots agrifood collectives since agrifood systems, globally, not only reflect and reproduce capitalist structures, but are also sustained sites of contestation and resistance to these structures. I analyse whether and how collectives develop alternative social and political forms that are neither based on, nor reproduce, statist and capitalist practices, norms, and institutions, as well as how they unsettle and challenge these structures through their democratic praxis. In the following sections, I develop the case and rationale for this analysis by explaining (a) the context in which sustainability transformation takes place (Section 1.1); (b) the potential for democratic praxis in grassroots collectives to act as a vehicle for sustainability transformation (Section 1.2); and (c) the reasons for looking at grassroots action for agrifood transformation as a way of studying sustainability transformation in-against-and-beyond capitalism and the state (Section 1.3).