“Comrades in ‘Farms’”: Shifting Identity Fields in a Market-Oriented Social Movement

Abstract

This article explores market-oriented activism in a branch of the alternative food movement called the Young Farmers Movement. Using archival and in-depth interview data from young beginning farmers across the United States, I explore how these individuals conceptualize farming as lifestyle activism and engage in a movement tactic called politicized production: the growing and selling of politicized goods for political consumers. Because politicized production places young farmers into competition with one another, this tactic fractures the identity fields into which activists typically organize themselves and others. I explore how they employ identity work techniques to strategically reframe other young farmers, as well as food system adversaries, in ways that repair and reorganize the movement’s identity fields. These findings connect literature on social movements and agrifood studies by exploring the overlap of movements and markets, and the limits and consequences of using identity work to facilitate market-oriented activism.