Introduction - Digital food activism: Food transparency one bite/byte at a time?
Series
Critical food studies
ISBN
978-1-138-08832-0
Type
book section
Date Issued
2018-01-18
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
This introductory chapter considers food activism within contemporary ‘digital food cultures’. Based on a review of the literature on food activism and digital activism, we introduce the concept of digital food activism, which we have developed to capture diverse forms of digitally mediated practices of food activism, their distinctiveness and their constitutive effects. We situate these practices within the larger multidisciplinary literature on digital devices, platforms and infrastructures, focusing on the affordances of digital platforms; here, our aim is to explore the kinds of interactions these platforms enable and constrain, and what this means for digital food activism. Building on our own research on digital food activism, which focuses on three case studies – a mobile app, a wiki platform, and an online-centric activist organization - we consider digital platforms used for food activism as ‘infrastructures that give rise to ontological experiments’ (Jensen and Morita, 2015) and call attention to how food is ontologically respecified in the entanglements of diverse types of activists and digital platforms. We illustrate this ontological respecification through an analysis of an auto-ethnographic episode that describes the encounter and entanglement between a researcher-consumer, barcode scanner app, supermarket, water bottle, multi-national corporation, Swiss mountain valley, crowd-sourced database, food-centred campaign and blog post. To conclude, we discuss the implications of this ontological respecification for agency, democracy and economy, and elucidate the similarities and differences between ‘traditional’ food activism (Counihan and Siniscalchi, 2014) and digital food activism.
Language
English
HSG Classification
contribution to scientific community
HSG Profile Area
SHSS - Kulturen, Institutionen, Maerkte (KIM)
Book title
Digital Food Activism
Publisher
Routledge
Publisher place
London
Start page
1
End page
24
Subject(s)
Eprints ID
251638
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Name
Schneider et al_DFA_Introduction_Food transparency.pdf
Size
482.61 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
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