Abstract
A significant section of the alternative food initiative (AFI) literature has expressed concerns about the predisposition of some research to assume neoliberal outcomes from particular AFI practices. As a counterpoint to this, there has been a call for analysis tools that will allow for a more nuanced understanding of the complexities and contradictions of AFI practices. In this paper, I explore the ethical dimension of AFI practices. By interrogating the relationship and interplay between ethics and their correlative ethical practices, new learning and knowledge are generated in both a lay and an academic context. Drawing on Derrida’s concept of aporetic ethics, I argue that what allows for such learning to happen is a non-foundational understanding of ethics and ethical practices. When we consider ethics, ethical practices and the relationship between the two as dynamic, fluid and emergent, we develop a disposition that foregrounds reflexivity and learning as key components for ‘eating in the anthropocene’ . With such a disposition and the learning it generates, researchers, both lay and academic, are in a stronger position to understand the complexities of AFI practices. I offer an illustration of such non-foundational ethics through research on food sovereignty collectives in northern Spain. The collectives demonstrate an understanding of the non-foundational nature of ethics and they employ practices to manage the productive discomfort that comes from destabilising ethics, contesting decisions, reflecting on approaches and using ethics as a process to learn how to care for others.
Keywords
Introduction
The politics and economics surrounding food have become a heightened topic of interest in recent times. The shift in many parts of the world to a neoliberal industrial model of food production and distribution has threatened the survival of smallholder farmers and the well-being of consumers in both the global north and global south. The nadir of this economic model was in 2008 when an additional 75 million people fell into the official classification of hungry whilst record harvests were recorded around the world (UN, 2009). This paradox provoked food riots in over 30 countries, from Haiti to Senegal to Indonesia (Holt-Gimenez, 2009: 144). Although probably the worst food crisis since the 1970s, this is only one in a series of food crises that have emerged in recent decades which have brought perplexing and egregious consequences. For example, Mexico, self-sufficient for over a century in its staple food of crop corn, has become dependent on imports from the USA and the global grain trade is now controlled by only four corporations (Bello, 2009: 43). Following this, the question of whether neoliberal industrial agriculture is the most appropriate model to produce and distribute food has been posed not just in “alternative” spaces, but in much more mainstream circles (Rundle, 2011; Williams, 2008). Through these debates, food has become highly politicised and finding other ways of organising food economies has become a topic of widespread consideration.
This politicisation has given rise to food production, distribution and consumption being explored as sites for social change, and has engendered an array of alternative food initiatives (AFIs) that forge new ways to pursue social and environmental justice. These diverse AFIs range from, for example, the Brazilian landless peasant movement that occupies abandoned land for sustainable farming, to community-supported agriculture in Japan that has consumer groups, with membership in the hundreds of thousands, commit to and invest in a farm’s production, to urban farming initiatives in Australia, South Korea, India, Egypt and many more countries that make use of green spaces in cities to grow food, create employment and strengthen communities (Borras, 2010: 779; Borras et al., 2010: 581). The end goals of these initiatives are social and environmental justice, and the practices employed to achieve these goals have a diverse range of purposes. Examples of these purposes are farming practices that enhance biodiversity rather than deplete it; food economies that pay farmers and farm employees for their work so that they can survive well; and food that has not relied for its production on chemicals that harm producers, consumers and the environment.
The proliferation of AFIs has been accompanied by a heightened interest from academia that has seen a surge in research publications related to AFIs in the past 15 years (Horst et al., 2017; Vivero-Pol, 2017). Much of the AFI literature has focused on the effectiveness of practices in the initiatives and how well they have delivered on social and environmental goals. A significant proportion of this literature has specifically critiqued AFIs and their role in producing and reproducing neoliberalism. There has been increasing concern that some of this research can display a predisposition to assume neoliberal outcomes from particular AFI practices (Allen and Guthman, 2006; DuPuis and Goodman, 2005; Guthman 2008; Holt Giménez and Shattuck, 2011; Alkon and Mares, 2012). This literature has been marked by the tendency to infer outcomes from certain practices. The concern about such an analytical approach is that the drawing of a causal link between certain practices and neoliberal outcomes has the potential to miss and dismiss much of AFI practice.
In response to this concern, there has been a call for better analytical tools that allow for approaches that are sensitive to the complexity of practices and their consequences (Crossan et al., 2016; Harris, 2009; McClintock, 2014). Such approaches, it is hoped, allow for a more nuanced understanding of the implications and consequences of AFI practices. In this context of developing tools to better understand the complexities of AFIs, I explore the ethical dimension of AFI practices. By interrogating the relationship and interplay between ethics and their correlative ethical practices, new learning and knowledge are generated. I argue that what allows for such learning to happen is a non-foundational understanding of ethics and their correlative ethical practices. When we consider ethics, ethical practices and the relationship between the two as dynamic, fluid and emergent we develop a disposition that foregrounds reflexivity and learning as key components of a relational ethics. With such a disposition and the learning it generates, researchers, both lay and academic, are in a stronger position to understand the complexities of AFI practices.
This paper is structured as follows. Firstly, I discuss the context of AFI literature and the judgement of certain AFI practices as reproducing neoliberalism. I explore the logic behind these judgements through the lens of querying the causal relationship of AFI “neoliberal techniques” and the wider neoliberal project. My purpose is to query what knowledge and learning opportunities get lost when researchers move too quickly to judge certain AFI practices as reproducing neoliberalism. Furthermore, I examine how the transformative potential of the AFIs might be curtailed rather than nurtured. Building on this, I look to other forms of research approaches that analyse AFI practices in a way that acknowledges their complexity, and in so doing generates enhanced learning for both lay and academic thought and practice.
Secondly, and in response to the call for better analytical tools and techniques, I make a case for a non-foundational understanding of ethics and their relationship to ethical practices by drawing on Derrida’s concept of aporetic ethics. By acknowledging that all decisions and practices are carried out in a context of aporia or doubt, we foreground the non-foundational nature of ethics and their correlative ethical practices, and generate a responsibility to consider what has been neglected or left out of our decisions. The productive discomfort that comes with such an approach creates conditions that facilitate reflexivity and learning. In turn, in a context in which practices are focused on social and environmental justice, this cultivates new responses and practices to care for others. Derrida’s work positions ethics as a process and as something to be navigated and managed. The approach of ethics as process offers the opportunity to create new learning, understanding and an awareness of the role that ethics and the interplay with ethical practices play in constructing knowledge.
Finally, I offer an illustration of a non-foundational understanding of ethics through research on the practices of food sovereignty collectives in northern Spain. The collectives share similar ethics and ethical practices to those of other AFIs. However, it is their treatment of ethics that offers a contribution to this special issue on “Learning the practice and ethics of food politics”. Rather than the ethics providing the guidance on what practices to pursue, the collectives demonstrate an understanding of the non-foundational nature of ethics and its dynamic relationship to ethical practices. The collectives use approaches that contest decisions, reflect on practices and interrogate the understanding of ethics as a process to generate new learning on how to care for others in the context of an alternative food economy.
Food, ethical practices and the spectre of neoliberalism
The term “alternative food initiative” has increased in usage in recent years and has grown to encompass an extensive list of food-related projects, activities and approaches. The concept performs a type of umbrella function and captures many and diverse ethical practices. 1 Some of the more prevalent ethical practices are: organic, local, fair trade, free range, sustainable, ethical consumption, mutual aid, agroecology and cruelty-free. These practices are accompanied by a set of correlative ethics. For example, often the ethical practice of organic farming can be motivated by an ethic of care for the environment and the health and well-being of the consumer; the ethical practice of fair trade can be motivated by an ethic of economic justice; and the ethical practice of agroecology might be motivated by a combination of these ethics. Although each ethical practice may imply a correlative ethic, there is no necessary relationship between an ethical practice and a particular set of ethics. Similarly, there is no causal relationship between a set of ethical practices and a particular outcome. Instead, the relationship between ethics, ethical practices and the outcomes is a process of situated meaning construction with no foundation or permanency to that meaning (Barnett et al., 2005; Bauman, 1993; Fagan, 2013). However, in the search for analysis and understanding, this contingency of meaning can get forgotten or obscured. In recent times, there has been a concern that the AFI literature demonstrates a tendency to obscure this contingency of meaning by rushing from assumed cause to perceived effect in order to pass judgement on the role of certain AFIs in reproducing neoliberalism.
Guthman, in her work on AFIs in California, identified four practices that perform the role of causes in the reproduction of neoliberalism. She states that “agro-food politics as well as the scholarship that supports it have contributed to neoliberal subject formation, as demonstrated by four recurring themes in contemporary food activism as they intersect with neoliberal rationalities: consumer choice, localism, entrepreneurialism, and self-improvement” (Guthman, 2008: 1171). For Guthman, identifying these practices leads researchers to view the AFI as complicit in effecting the wider neoliberal project. Similarly Argüelles et al., in their analysis of AFIs in Europe, find that certain practices “undermine … radical possibilities” because of the initiatives’ use of “neoliberal rationalities” that reproduce neoliberal conditions. This adjudication is based on the alternative food initiatives’ commitment to practices that emphasize “individual freedom and autonomy” and “rely on individuals’ capacities to self-organise” (Argüelles et al., 2017: 39). Of course, these practices could demonstrate “neoliberal rationalities”, but equally they are the underpinnings of a myriad of diverse political positions, from anarchism to autonomous Marxism to classic liberalism. Busa and Garder, in their work on alternative food initiatives in Massachusetts, critique the initiatives with a similar line of reasoning: “Despite the radical roots of the alternative food movement, complicity with neoliberalism has become commonplace in alternative food discourse, as is made obvious by the ubiquity of focuses on health, consumer choice, education about ‘right’ eating, and personal responsibility” (Busa and Garder, 2015: 324). In this literature, the complexity of the relationship between the ethics and the ethical practices is glossed over in an effort to identify certain practices as party to reproducing neoliberalism. A focus on such an approach runs the risk of a twin closure of opportunities for learning and new knowledge both at the academic research level and at the lay practice level.
Undoubtedly, analysing and understanding neoliberalism is vital to any pursuit of social change. However, there is important literature that cautions us against the tendency to see everything as a neoliberal practice (Collier, 2005; Ferguson, 2010; Kern and McClean, 2017; Larner, 2003). Ferguson distinguishes between the macro political economic project of neoliberalism and what he argues are characterised as the “neoliberal techniques”. There is no natural “cause and effect” or inherent relationship between the neoliberal techniques and a wider neoliberal project. In fact, Ferguson argues, what are often considered core neoliberal techniques, such as quantitative calculation or free choice, are put to many different ends and produce a multitude of results. Therefore, rather than these neoliberal techniques reproducing neoliberalism, what the techniques produce is unknown and needs to be discovered. For example, the retreat of the state (or, in the context of AFIs, a focus on the local) and the promotion of individual choice and entrepreneurship may in fact produce significant advancements in social and environmental justice. Ferguson says that the fact “that certain political initiatives and programs borrow from the neoliberal bag of tricks doesn’t mean that these political projects are in league with the ideological project of neoliberalism” (Ferguson, 2010: 174). Ferguson alerts us to the dangers that come from treating certain ethical practices as having a universal and foundational character. One of the dangers can be characterised by what he calls a “politics of denunciation” (Ferguson, 2010: 169) in which, applied to the context of AFIs, all we can see is a ubiquitous cause-and-effect relationship of practices producing neoliberalism. In turn, this facilitates a denunciation of the ethical practices of the AFIs. In a scholarly context, we become what Kern and Mclean describe as “academic coroners” (Kern and Mclean, 2017: 410).
In the context of the AFI literature, there have been specific calls for more nuanced understandings of AFI practices (Agyeman and McEntee, 2014; Calvário and Kallis, 2017; Classens 2015; Crossan et al. 2016; Harris, 2009; Moragues‐Faus; 2016; McClintock, 2014;). McClintock argues that “plotting urban agriculture or other AFNs along a neoliberal to radical gradient (Holt Giménez and Wang 2011, Alkon and Mares 2012) risks essentialising their multiple functions, rationalities, and meanings” (Horst et al., 2017: 1). Guthman, who has been prolific in her work on analysing AFIs through the lens of neoliberalism, has argued in recent research with Alkon that AFI practices “hold the potential to become harbingers of a new shift in food and agricultural movements, ones that use market-based strategies to build towards collective action on inequalities, labor, sustainability and social justice. They have much to teach, not only to activists, but also to the scholars who have been critical of neoliberal food activism” (Alkon and Guthman, 2017: 6). Harris (2009), in his paper on neoliberal subjectivities and alternative food networks, argues that it is important not to close down, through a particular research approach, the space of possibility by seeing only neoliberal outcomes from certain AFI practices. He takes one example of an AFI practice – the 100 Mile Diet – and explores it using two approaches: the first through a neoliberal lens and the second applying Gibson-Graham’s (2006) notion of “reading for difference” to the AFI landscape. Through the comparison, Harris highlights the concern that assuming neoliberal outcomes from particular AFI practices generates a myopic research disposition that is capable only of seeing neoliberalism at play and is blind to the other possible outcomes. In particular he emphasizes how, through the first approach, the knowledge generated by the AFI is linked to individual choice and judged as reproducing neoliberal forms. In the second, Harris foregrounds a process of self-education that is key to the AFI’s goals.
This body of literature seeks to move AFI research beyond a limiting neoliberal lens and offers a repertoire of analytical tools to draw on to understand the nuances, complexities and contradictions of AFIs. My purpose is to contribute to this literature by exploring the non-foundational nature of ethics and their correlative ethical practices. I turn to Derrida’s work on aporetic ethics to consider how a process of foregrounding the non-foundational nature of ethics might generate new learning and knowledge for AFI practices.
Ethics and the Other
Through his concept of deconstruction, Derrida (1974) developed an understanding of the nature, conditions and limits of ethics and their application. His purpose was to highlight the danger and implications of treating ethics as foundational. Furthermore, Derrida sought to instil a responsibility to foreground and manage the unstable nature of ethics. His theoretical argument turns on the following question: if we accept the philosophical position that as subjects we are constituted and defined through our relationship to the Other, what are the implications for ethics? Rather than an ontology that prioritises an autonomous subject over the Other, Derrida develops the lineage of thinking from Nietzsche to Heidegger through to Levinas that posits the fundamental relational dimension of our being. Our subjectivity is not something developed by an autonomous subject. Instead, our very being is defined by and through the presence of the Other, and we come into being only through our relationship with the Other. The Other, in this philosophical lineage, refers to a conceptual representation of the responsibility that we owe to an unknown person. In the context of a relational ethics, the Other represents the disruption to any certainty or decision and the impermanency of the relationship of ethics and their correlative ethical practices. From this follows the question of how to respond to the presence and call of the Other, and it is in this response that ethics are generated. Derrida described the moment in these terms: “there is no ethics without the presence of the Other” (Derrida, 1974: 139–140). This moment or generation of ethics carries no intrinsic normativity. However, what is key to this moment is the contingent and unstable nature of the “call of the Other”.
Anderson (2102: 4), developing Derrida’s thinking on ethics, highlights the paradox in our response to the Other. Each ethical pronouncement is universal in its absolute proclamation, but is immediately negated by an inability to practise the pure form of the ethic. For example, the ethical practice of organic farming may seek to apply an ethic of care for the environment but it will always fall short. The process of falling short of fulfilling the ethic taints and reshapes the meaning of the ethic and its correlative ethical practice, and hence creates an instability. Anderson describes this paradoxical process as “ethics under erasure”. This is a continual dialogic and dialectical process between the ethic and its ethical practice. This dynamic process inherent to ethics is generated through the relationship of the subject to the Other because subjects will never be able to know and respond fully to the “call of the Other”. This inability is characterised by Derrida’s concept of undecidability, which refers to all the calculations and knowledge that are beyond us to make an ethical decision that “fully” responds to the Other. Derrida detaches the traditional metaphysical notion of the decision as residing with the subject and places it as a reciprocal endeavour between the subject and Other. But the subject is unable ever to fully accommodate the call of the Other, and consequently the ethical decision is singular in that it is contingent on the conditions of the moment and always falls short of the ethic. Consequently, Derrida captures this by positing that all decisions are made in the context of aporia. Anderson describes the implications of undecidability and aporia as a challenge for ethics, “producing dilemmas in our ethical choice-making and decision-taking (and thus contaminating the dichotomy between right/wrong and good/bad)” (Anderson, 2012: 11).
The process of acknowledging and managing the unstable and contingent nature of the meaning of an ethic has implications for ethical practices or, in theoretical terms, our “response” to the Other. Fagan cautions against a scenario of a politics that does not consider the non-foundational nature of ethics: By the time that it comes to the political question … the ethical debate has already been had and resolved. The exact places where difficult, contradictory, unclear and unsecure answers need to be discussed, debated and fought out have already been both occupied and bounded by the very foundations which prior attempts at theorising a judgement or response have put in place. What happens, it seems, when theoretical ethical foundations are invoked, is that the possible space for political and ethical debate becomes circumscribed. (Fagan, 2013: 3).
Food sovereignty and how to navigate ethics
Food sovereignty as a concept emerged in the mid-1990s through peasant-led social movements in Latin America and is defined as “the right of peoples, communities, and countries to define their own agricultural, labour, fishing, food and land policies which are ecologically, socially, economically and culturally appropriate to their unique circumstances” (People's Food Sovereignty Forum, 2009: 1). The range of issues that the movement is seeking to change is extensive, and includes land reform, biodiversity, women’s rights, genetically modified food, non-capitalist economies and sustainable food production. Consequently, the range of ethics that the movement draws on and aligns with food sovereignty is broad. This breadth is reflected in the fact that the social movement is now a coalition of 148 organisations from 69 countries with an estimated 150 million members (Borras, 2010: 779).
The food sovereignty movement is explicit about the tensions between its ethics and ethical practice. Patel describes the role of food sovereignty ethics as a “call” and presents its purpose in the following terms: “The call is an active attempt to incite context-specific transformation within a context of universal (and defensibly humanist) principles of dignity, individual and community sovereignty, and self-determination. It is an anchor for local interpretations of food sovereignty” (Patel, 2005: 82, emphasis added). “The call” has echoes of Derrida’s moment of generating ethics through the call of the Other, and Patel’s description of a specific response to a wider universal has strong parallels with Anderson’s notion of the singular nature of every ethical decision. For the food sovereignty movement at an international level, this language takes on many contours of an acknowledgement of the non-foundational character of ethics and ethical practices. I now turn to a “local interpretation” to consider how two of the food sovereignty ethics are managed.
At a local and regional level, the Asturian food sovereignty collective of Vieyu Rabicu 2 provides a window on one way in which the “local interpretation” of ethics and ethical practices can be managed. Established in the early 2000s, the collective is an initiative of smallholder farmers to create new economies with a focus on social and environmental justice. As in many other parts of Spain, the smallholder farmers of Asturias suffered significantly when Spain entered the European Community and signed up to its Common Agricultural Policy. In Asturias in 1986, there were 42,000 farms; by 2003 this number had dropped to 3000 (Garcia Morilla and Romero, 2005: 117). Consequently, the collective sought to establish different ethics and practices that would allow smallholder farmers to survive. In setting up their own alternative food economies, the key mechanism for communication and decision making between members was through the assembly, which promoted a direct democracy style of inclusion. The ethical practices promoted by Vieyu Rabicu are similar to other AFIs and range from agroecology and autonomy to cooperation, mutual aid, non-capitalism, fair trade, worker dignity, local production and exchange. However, the members regularly state that underpinning these ethical practices are ethics of justice, reflexivity and care for others and the environment. This was contrasted with their experiences of working with regional and national governments in the context of the Common Agricultural Policy. The assembly is the key space for all the collective members, whether they be farmers, shop employees or volunteers, to discuss, negotiate, disagree and ultimately come to a decision on these ethics and their correlative practices. 3 Furthermore, members discussed the dangers that come with using terms such as “organic” or “fair trade”. Their concern was that on a day-to-day basis the terms are used with an implied understanding and agreement on not only what they mean but the ethics that underpin them. The danger of this deceptive ethical foundation for Vieyu Rabicu members is the way ethical practices can be implemented by members with quite different and conflicting intentions. To counter this danger, many members seek to create doubt around this deceptive certainty in order to stimulate discussion and negotiation. I now explore the collective’s experience with the ethics of mutual aid and fair trade to illustrate this approach to foregrounding aporia and managing ethics.
Mutual aid
Mutual aid refers to the practice of people coming together to support each other in a cooperative rather than competitive fashion for a collective mutual benefit. It is an ethical practice that was discussed on a daily basis in meetings, workshops or just in informal conversations. In describing their economic practices, members of the Vieyu Rabicu depicted mutual aid as the ethical backdrop to guide their activities. Although it was very regularly invoked to provide assurance on a course of action, the ethic was equally the focus of interrogation as to its meaning. I heard the statement “This is an example of mutual aid” on many occasions, but rarely signifying the same thing. There were instances when the statement was used to inform new members coming into the collective about the purpose of the long, involved conversations with farmers to ensure that all the costs of producing the food were factored into the price. The collective has a commitment to move beyond a traditional market mechanism and to ensure that the price of food reflects everything from the ongoing welfare of the farmer’s family to the investment in the soil nutrients of the farm. Alternatively, the statement was used in question form to query the choice by some of the collective’s farmers to sell some of their produce to local supermarkets. Some members of the collective felt that there should be no dealings with supermarkets as they were part of the problem that was undermining smallholder farming in the first place. Some farmers, on the other hand, argued that they needed to sell to a number of different places in order to offer security if the demand for food from the collective decreased. Alternatively, on occasions, I heard the statement used with a rhetorical, ironic and slightly indignant tone when members picked up their veggie box and saw multiple bunches of chard. The collective has a commitment to its farmers to buy for the weekly member food box whatever seasonal produce the farmers have on offer. Asturias is a very rainy part of Spain and in winter, with the cold, there is a very limited variety of vegetables that will grow.
One farmer, Angeles, from the east of Asturias, described this dynamic of the ethic of mutual aid as follows: Ultimately it [mutual aid] means dialogue and reflection with others. Economies that are based on mutual aid and dialogue offer an opportunity for farmers to live with dignity … How do our practices and the decisions we make support others in the collective and across the region? We can only know the answer to this question by listening to others in the collective. The idea of mutual aid is one important aspect that defines us as a collective but what we do in terms of our ideas, practices and decisions in the collective defines our notion of mutual aid. So we never have a finished definition for mutual aid. But this is how we learn and grow. Once we stop asking questions about what we mean to do, we stop listening to each other.
Fair trade
The Spanish term comercio justo is the equivalent of fair trade; however, the literal translation is “commerce/trade justice”. The collective began much of its work with farmers under an ethical practice of “fair trade”, seeing the ethics of social and environmental justice as fundamental to its practices. The fair trade with farmers has involved developing a strong understanding for all members of the collective as to the different costs of producing food. This could include: compensation for lost crops due to bad weather; the cost of time and travel to attend the Vieyu Rabicu’s assembly meetings; or the fees and processes involved in organic certification. In the late 1990s, when the collective formed, the “fair trade” of Cadbury’s chocolate and Nescafé coffee had yet to arrive in the Spanish supermarkets. When the “fair trade” brands became commonplace in the big supermarkets, the collective had to wrestle with the interplay between the ethical practice, its correlative ethics and the intended outcomes of the fair trade ethical practice.
Noemi is a sheep farmer who was involved in setting up the collective. She described the experience of the shifting meaning of fair trade and how they chose to manage the ethic: We thought about abandoning altogether the term of fair trade. It felt like it had been stolen from us. For years, we had been using the term to capture a practice and an ethic of solidarity and then all of a sudden the supermarkets and big producers saw it as an opportunity to sell and it became something very different. But instead of walking away from it, we came to see it as an opportunity to discuss and explore our understanding of the ethics behind fair trade and how this differs from the big supermarkets. And that led us to create “Espacio por un Comercio Justo” [A Space for Fair Trade, which involves a network of 25 organisations from all areas across the Iberian Peninsula] that allows people across the region and country to think about what fair trade means and how we might practise it. Also, as a space, it has allowed us to think about how we might challenge the supermarkets’ use of the term. Espacio is a great space for us to work out what we mean by it, how that changes and how exactly it is that we disagree with the supermarkets’ use of the term. We learnt we had to keep alive our understanding of fair trade in the face of the big supermarkets’ use of the term. “ethics under erasure” reveals that … ethics is a constant oscillation and negotiation with singular situations requiring singular responses (possibilities) which simultaneously reshape, reconstitute, reinvent norms. “Ethics under erasure” reveals that, through singular responses, the perceived universal and unifying position of … ethics is constantly being undermined, is shifting and forever changing. (Anderson, 2012: 86).
Conclusion
A significant section of the AFI literature has expressed concerns about the predisposition of some research to assume neoliberal outcomes from particular AFI practices. To counter this, there has been a flourishing body of AFI literature that draws on analytical tools which allow for an understanding of the complexities and contradictions of AFI practices. The purpose is, in part, to generate new learning and knowledge about AFI practices. How we view ethics plays a key role in knowledge production, and in turn is a constituent part of AFI practices for social change. The meaning of an ethic is necessarily destabilised through the pursuit of its ethical practices. Foregrounding this dynamic is a conceptual tool for opening up and creating opportunities for new understandings and possibilities. Using the tool is a twofold process. First, an acknowledgement of the unstable meaning of ethics is required. Subsequent to this is the need for a process to navigate this destabilising of ethics. Popke, in his work on Derrida’s ethics, argues that “universal principles […] always carry the potential to relieve us of our responsibility for our judgements and decisions. For when we can simply rely upon the application of rules and norms, our accountability becomes elided” (Popke, 2003: 306). A process to navigate the non-foundational character of ethics should highlight our responsibility to care for others in any pursuit for social change.
The food sovereignty collective of Vieyu Rabicu has taken an explicit approach to how it manage its ethics. The collective foregrounds the singular interpretation and contestation that each member of Vieyu Rabicu brings to its ethics. The members do this by creating spaces, such as the assembly and the regional space of encounter, but also by fostering many other less formal encounters, to facilitate discussion, debate, disagreement and negotiation. In so doing, Vieyu Rabicu cultivates a responsibility to care for the well-being of its farmers, members, the broader community in Asturias and the region’s ecology. This responsibility encourages the members to be attentive to what might have been missed or inadvertently excluded through a commitment to an ethic. In being attentive to how an ethic can “absorb rather than emit meaning” (Webb, 2016: 1), Vieyu Rabicu nurtures new understanding and learning about its ethics that develop an awareness of the role these ethics play in constructing the collective’s knowledge. This collective demonstrates that, for food practices to be transformative, reflection and learning are integral components. Focusing on the unstable interplay between ethics and ethical practices is one way to initiate the reflection and generate the opportunity for new learning for both lay and academic thought and practice.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge and thank Jenny Cameron and Matthew Bunn for their feedback on earlier drafts of this manuscript.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.