The UNMAKING team organized two workshops at this year’s Food Autonomy Festival in Utrecht (29 May 2022). Guilherme Raj designed and facilitated a workshop on ‘Queering the countryside: the role of agri-food grassroots initiatives expanding sexuality and gender norms’. Julia Spanier, Jacob Smessaert, Guilherme Raj and Giuseppe Feola facilitated a workshop that was designed by…

Last week Guilherme Raj presented the paper titled ‘Rural queer (dis)empowerment in community-supported agriculture‘, in the session ‘Food Justice in Alternative Food Networks: theoretical, empirical and transdisciplinary perspectives’ at the Science and Technology Studies conference 2022 in Graz, Austria. Abstract. This paper examines if and how community-supported agriculture initiatives (CSA) (dis)empower rural queer dwellers involved…

Laura van Oers presented the paper ‘Setting-up a participatory guarantee system (PGS) with Dutch food communitie’, which is sco-authored by Jacob Smessaert at the 7th conference of the Network of Early Career Researchers in Sustainability Transitions, 5-6 May in Lyon, France. Abstract Deliberate sustainability transformation calls for democratic renewal (Stirling 2015; Goetz et al. 2020)….

Spanier, J., Feola, G. 2022. Nurturing the post-growth city: bringing the rural back in. In: Savini, F., Ferreria, A., von Schönfeld, K. C. (Eds.)  Post-Growth Planning: cities beyond the market economy. Routledge, 159-172.  Abstract It is widely acknowledged that cities are destructive to the environment and the natural resources that sustain human and non-human life (Næss et al., 2020). Any planning for post-growth…

Raj, G., Feola, G., Hajer, M., Runhaar, H., 2022. Power and empowerment of grassroots innovations for sustainability transitions: A review. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 43. 375-392. Abstract The sustainability transitions scholarship is increasingly applying power and empowerment frameworks to investigate the role of grassroots innovations in the politics of societal change; however, theoretical fragmentation persists. This paper…

Today Giuseppe Feola gave a research seminar titled ‘The Schismogenic Hypothesis: Conceptualizing Grassroots Sustainability Transformation as a Process of Conscious Self-Determination by Differentiation‘ at the Konrad Lorenz Institute in Klosterneuburg (Austria), as part of a short visiting fellowship at this institution. Abstract: Theorizations of sustainability transformation have foregrounded the construction (making) of novel socioecological relations;…

Today Giuseppe Feola gave a research seminar titled ‘Unmaking Capitalism: per una trasformazione verso la sostenibilità. Il caso delle iniziative agro-alimentari comunitarie’ at the Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento. posterfeola060422_0 Short interview (in Italian) here.

15 March 2022. This evening Giuseppe Feola gave a talk at the Interdisciplinary Night on Climate Change organized by the Study Association for Sociology Students at Tilburg University. His talk explored the roles of grassroots initiatives in sustainability transformation, including insights from the UNMAKING project.

On 1 November Giuseppe Feola participated in the show Planting Permission at Dublin Digital Radio, an indipendent online radio station and alternative media platform. In the 1-hourn long conversation with the host, Oisin Klinkenbergh, Giuseppe talked about transformation to sustainability and capitalism, degrowth and the circular economy, and the role of grassoots social movements in…

We welcome abstract submissions to our special session on Power and politics in agri-food system transformation at the upcoming conference of the European Society of Ecological Economics (Pisa, Italy, 14-17 June 2022).   Submissions via this link.   Session description Sustainability transformations are inherently political. The processes and outcomes of sustainability transformations are shaped by…