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Corn Coalitions: Struggles for Food Sovereignty in Mexico
Bethany.turner[at]canberra.edu.au MEXICO IS THE BIRTHPLACE OF CORN and it is here that the world’s greatest biodiversity of this plant exists, largely under the guardianship of diverse indigenous farmers. The Maya of Southern Mexico have a particularly close spiritual and cultural connection with this plant, as their creation story details how their flesh is made from [...]
What we talk about when we talk about biotechnology
ksb[at]yorku.ca Abstract: Genetic engineering (GE) of crops is an apogee of corporatized and industrialized farming and the technology threatens food sovereignty. A group of organic producers from Saskatchewan, Canada, has taken Monsanto to court because its GE canola has contaminated organic fields. An ethnography of case participants points to an impasse between the dominant framing [...]
On the politics and possibilities of locavores: situating food sovereignty in the turn from government to governance
This paper situates discourses of local food activism, specifically, and food sovereignty, generally, in conversation with the themes of governance, governmentality and biopolitics. Governance, in this sense, points to the movement of politics in line with neoliberal globalization which places emphasis on the individual and its self-governing capacities, on one hand, as well as new [...]
Pollanated Politics, or, The Neoliberal’s Dilemma
chadlavin[at]gmail.com Abstract: Michael Pollan has recently emerged as an informal spokesperson for the growing movement for responsible eating. This essay examines the assumptions underlying Pollan’s recent prescriptions for food reform and demonstrates how these prescriptions remain limited by the political horizon of neoliberalism. More broadly, the essay situates the recent politicization of food within a [...]
The Politics of Mediated Gender: Women Politicians in the Bulgarian Press
1. Introduction Almost twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is not too far-fetched to argue that Eastern European women have carried the burden of the post-communist transition. The transformative paradigm shift caused by the collapse of communism left the political and social positions of women in shambles. And while the Soviet [...]
Productive censorship. Revisiting recent research on the cultural meanings of film censorship.
Censorship used to be quite a predictable research subject. It was often associated with ideas about State oppression, intolerant governments or other powerful institutions controlling the minds of powerless citizens and society’s dominated classes. Censorship was related to dictators and their brutal strategies to limit freedom of speech, or to undermine artistic expression. It was [...]
Hybridities in political media discourse
1. Political discourse in context In the age of mediatized mass democracies, political discourse in the media is an important means for ordinary people to encounter politics (Lauerbach & Fetzer, 2007). This is particularly true of political debates and interviews, in which political information is transmitted in dialogue-anchored forms. Against this background, different discourse genres, [...]
What makes Poland a post-communist country?
To a western ear there is presumably nothing ambiguous about the term post-communism. It seems to be merely descriptive, referring to the realities of countries which only 20 years ago lived under the political and socio-economical system known as ‘real socialism’. In the last decades, those countries are believed to have been undergoing the process [...]
Monsanto Rules: Science, Government, and Seed Monopoly