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Connecting People and Places to Foster Food Justice: A Poststructural Feminist and Aesthetic Account of a Social Benefit Organization

Ivancic, Sonia R
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2901-2924
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1531922893596218

Abstract Details

2018, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, Communication Studies (Communication).
This dissertation explores how a small nonprofit organization—Community Food Initiatives (CFI)—organizes to create a more just, sovereign food system in Southeast Ohio. Using poststructural feminist and aesthetic sensibilities, I demonstrate how organizing for food justice is dilemmatic and simultaneously material and discursive. Ethnographic field methods, including participant observation, visual ethnography, indepth (mobile) interviews, and drawing visual metaphors are used in order to gain an onthe- ground, in-depth understanding of how situated discourses and lived experiences reveal creative ways of addressing food insecurity and food system injustice. The analysis in Chapters 4, 5, and 6 responds to the following questions: How does CFI’s communication (dis)connect people and food with place? How do discourses and materialites of organization, labor, and difference collide? Why is this consequential for how we structure work and address food (in)justice? How are food and social justice understood, enabled, and constrained by neoliberal organizing models and corporate colonization? Chapter 4 analyzes the narratives that CFI constructs about place and food, introducing the concepts of place-based narrative labor and storied food, including micro and macro seed stories. I articulate how these stories are discursive/material change agents that create, reveal, and transform (dis)connections to food and place. Chapter 5 explores how nonprofit food labor interacts with constructions of positionality and difference, with a particular focus on class, gender, race, and culture (e.g., the “Appalachian” subject position). This chapter argues that the (mostly female) nonprofit food laborers exist in a degraded third space and that assessments of other people’s social class positioning are created through composite markers of association. Last, the metaphor of the “food making machine” and CFI’s response to it guides the analysis of Chapter 6, as organizational members and affiliates resist neoliberal ideologies and corporate colonization. In this chapter, I demonstrate that CFI imagines a resilient local food system of shared resources and that “local food” is about much more than distance or miles traveled. “Local food” for CFI is a set of qualitative features that revolve around the desire for body sovereignty, authentic solicitude, and increasing community impact and capacities for local decision making. Ultimately, this dissertation demonstrates small ways that the industrial food system and corporate colonization can be resisted by grassroots organizing efforts.
Lynn Harter (Committee Chair)
Brittany Peterson (Committee Member)
Laura Black (Committee Member)
Risa Whitson (Committee Member)
448 p.
Communication; Organization Theory
Materiality; nonprofit organizing; corporate colonization; aesthetic; poststructural feminism; food justice; food sovereignty

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Ivancic, S. R. (2018). Connecting People and Places to Foster Food Justice: A Poststructural Feminist and Aesthetic Account of a Social Benefit Organization [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1531922893596218

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Ivancic, Sonia. Connecting People and Places to Foster Food Justice: A Poststructural Feminist and Aesthetic Account of a Social Benefit Organization. 2018. Ohio University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1531922893596218.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Ivancic, Sonia. "Connecting People and Places to Foster Food Justice: A Poststructural Feminist and Aesthetic Account of a Social Benefit Organization." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio University, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1531922893596218

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

ohiou1531922893596218
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This open access ETD is published by Ohio University and OhioLINK.