Today Giuseppe Feola gave a talk titled ‘(Un)making capitalism in transformation to sustainability: The case of grassroots agri-food initiatives‘ at the Chair of International Relations at the University of Darmstadt, Germany (online).

On 30 June Giuseppe Feola presented gave a talk titled ‘Unmaking unsustainability: global environmental change, capitalism, and societal transformation from the grassroots in agri-food systems‘ at the International Political Ecology Summer School in Ljubljana, Slovenia (online). Related publications are: Koretskaya, O., Feola, G., 2020. A framework for recognizing diversity beyond capitalism in agri-food systems. Journal of Rural…

Last week Leonie Guerrero Lara and Julia Spanier presented the paper ‘A one-sided love affair? An empirical study on the potential of a coalition between the Degrowth and Community Supported Agriculture movement in Germany‘ at the Alternative Futures & Popular Protest conference hosted by the University of Manchester.   Abstract: The degrowth community has started…

Leonie Guerrero Lara, Guilherme Raj, Jacob Smessaert and Giuseppe Feola presented papers at the 14th conference of the European Society for Ecological Economics in Pisa, Italy, last week. Leonie Guerrero Lara presented the paper ‘The politics of the Netzwerk Solidarische Landwirtschaft: from prefiguration to conventional repertoires’ (abstract here); Guilherme Raj presented the paper ‘Power in…

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;…