Aline Stehrenberger
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Stehrenberger
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Aline
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aline.stehrenberger@unisg.ch

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“At first, I was only a subscriber”: re-mediating food citizens’ solidarity practices through digital technologies

2023 , Aline Stehrenberger , Tanja Schneider

In this paper, we explore how digital technologies re-mediate solidarity practices in alternative food networks (AFNs). To do so, the first author conducted an 8-month (auto-)ethnography of a community supported agriculture (CSA) initiative in Switzerland and 12 semi-structured interviews with CSA members. We identified three types of solidarity practices in our analysis that aim to support social inclusiveness, increase responsibility and sustainability, and foster the sharing of risk, work and infrastructure amongst CSA members. Digital technologies are central for joining and becoming a member of the CSA and also play a vital role in sharing information and organizing members’ work assignments. By becoming a member, consumers become subscribers voting with their wallet. If they regularly engage in farm work, they become prosumers or co-producers. Thus, our analysis foregrounds the continuum of food citizenship in the CSA we studied. However, the number of subscribers increases through digital technologies, transforming the initiative from an alternative to the market to an alternative within the market, whereby certain aspects of solidarity, such as social inclusiveness and sharing, are not realized anymore. Our study contributes to the emerging field of digital food studies by showing how solidarity is digitally enabled and negotiated in CSA, and how this shapes food citizenship.

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I shop therefore I am: Donating shopping dta as a steppingstone to rethinking (individual) consumption

2023-09-11 , Tanja Schneider , Giada Danesi , Aline Stehrenberger , Klaus Fuchs , Jing Wu , Simon Mayer

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Monetization of Food (Waste) in the Platform Economy

2023 , Aline Stehrenberger

Start-ups that aim to reduce food waste with a platform solution commonly accessed through a mobile phone application (app) interface are increasingly attracting investments: In January 2021 TooGoodToGo raised $31 million, and OLIO received $43 million in venture capital (TechCrunch, 2021). In this paper, I explore apps that focus on household food waste reduction, and I ask how different monetization practices shape practices of food waste redistribution; by monetization practices, I refer to ways of how something is turned into revenue. I first provide a short overview of current research on food waste apps and the platform economy (e.g., Kenney & Zysman, 2016; Scnicek, 2017; Fuentes & Sörum, 2019). I then introduce the two cases I build my paper on (1) TooGoodToGo, which connects restaurants/supermarkets and consumers to distribute surplus menus, and (2) OLIO, a community-based sharing platform for food and other consumer goods that redistributes private household surpluses for free. To study them, I have taken an (online) ethnographical approach, including the app walkthrough method, document analysis, and semi-structured interviews (Hine, 2015; Light et al., 2018; Leer & Strøm Krogager, 2021; Asdal & Reinertsen, 2022). In my analysis, I first show what is monetized through the introduction of the app. Then I elaborate on how monetization practices around the apps are changing food waste redistribution. My analysis shows how TooGoodToGo and OLIO turn food (waste) into a (new) resource by redistributing rather than reducing food waste. I thereby add to existing research on the platform economy with two cases of how the platform economy and related promises of “doing good” (Asdal et al., 2021) are used to turn food waste into a resource for the platform-enabled sharing economy.

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Re-making digital food futures in interdisciplinary collaborations

2023-09-05 , Tanja Schneider , Aline Stehrenberger

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Food waste in "the good economy": An ethnographic study of the design of a novel food waste app

2022-07-06 , Stehrenberger, Aline , Schneider, Tanja

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