On 28 November 2024 Julia Spanier successfully defended her PhD thesis titled ‘A rural(–urban) perspective: Agricultural grassroots initiatives and the making of post-capitalist futures’. Abstract. This PhD thesis explores the role of agricultural grassroots initiatives (AGIs) in societal transformations away from the capitalist status quo. AGIs are bottom-up, small-scale alternatives that exist within (and in…

Julia Spanier, Leonie Guerrero Lara and Jacob Smessaert co-authored a new paper titled ‘Building solidarities and alliances between degrowth and food sovereignty movements‘ (Journal of Political Ecology). Degrowth and food sovereignty movements share commitments to social-ecological transformation, democracy and the flourishing of human and non-human life. Encounters between the two movements have been relatively limited, however….

On 26 September 2024, Giuseppe Feola presented the paper titled ‘Beyond refusal: reconceptualising deconstruction in prefigurative social spaces’ at the Conference ‘Grassroots Innovations as Incubators of Sustainability Transitions’ at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Abstract. Social scientists have often studied grassroots initiatives in terms of prefiguration, which has generated important insights into the construction of…

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…

The paper ‘Degrowth and agri-food systems: a research agenda for the critical social sciences‘, published in Sustainability Science, received a honorable mention in the journal’s 2023 Best Paper competition.

van Oers, L., Feola, G., Moors, E., Runhaar, H., (in press). Facilitating unlearning in agricultural education: preparing for family-farm succession. The Journal of Agricultural Education and Extension. Abstract: This paper seeks to explore the manner in which secondary vocational education in agriculture can facilitate unlearning among young farmers. In this context, ‘unlearning’ means deliberately letting go…

Giuseppe Feola delivered the keynote talk at the opening session of the 15th Conference of the International Farming Systems Association in Trapani, Italy, on 1 July 2024. The talk, titled ‘Postgrowth farming systems: critique, visions, pathways‘, argued that the unsustainability and injustice of industrial food systems in modern capitalist societies have roots not merely in…

van Oers, L., Smessaert, J., Feola, G., (in press). Initiating transformation within a Dutch grassroots agri-food initiative: An analysis of social processes. Sociologia Ruralis. This article brings new empirical evidence and nuanced reflections on the social processes of transformation within grassroots agri-food initiatives that propose relocalised, decentralised and autonomous ways of organising around food systems….

On 26 June 2024 Laura van Oers successfully defended her PhD thesis titled ‘Unlearning unsustainability: Facilitating phase-out in sustainability transitions in the Dutch food system‘. The thesis aims to contribute to scholarly debates on the governance of regime destabilisation and phase-out in sustainability transition studies. In particular, I suggest broadening the notion of phase-out in…

On 22 May 2024, Guilherme Raj defends his thesis titled ‘It is about power: Unveiling power and empowerment in grassroots agri-food initiatives’. This PhD thesis aims to elucidate the role of power and empowerment in the sustainability transformation of agri-food systems. Guilherme focuses on agri-food transformation within grassroots agri-food initiatives, which serve as spaces for…