Rachel Slocum

Polar Bears and Energy-Efficient Lightbulbs: Strategies to Bring Climate Change Home:

Global climate change is the focus of climate politics organized across scales by a range of organizations. These organizations represent climate change in ways they hope will make the problem relevant to people and thereby inspire political action. The strategies require a choice of objects to bring climate change home to constituents. Some objects are ‘more local’ to certain constituencies—that is, they are more meaningful. Greenpeace Canada represents the impact of climate change via the object of the hungry polar bear. The Cities for Climate Protection campaign makes climate change relevant, in part, by its focus on the cost-saving benefits of energy efficiency. The process of localizing climate change constitutes society. I use feminist science studies as a theoretical basis to support my argument that organizations localizing climate change might choose objects that are more accountable to their constitutive effects on societies. I point out potential pitfalls in the choice of the polar bear and energy efficiency, and suggest some possibility in these objects.

Consumer Citizens and the Cities for Climate Protection Campaign

The Cities for Climate Protection campaign, an effort to lower greenhouse-gas emissions at the city scale, operates within the neoliberal state. Two features characterize the interaction of the state and the public via this campaign: a lack of public involvement, and the construction of the citizen as a passive consumer. The author emphasizes a tension that exists between two readings of the consumer citizen: the pliable figure who listens to neoliberal bottom-line arguments, and the political economic actor who identifies not with consumerism but with political change. Citizens thus cannot be wholly embodied by constructions such as the consumer, and consumerist activism has potential. Citizens, though often interpellated as consumers, can position themselves as reasoning publics who see climate change, their cities, and themselves in relational perspective. The author enlists Foucauldian and deliberative-democracy theory to explore the making of citizens through the Cities for Climate Protection campaign.

Race in the Study of Food

Recent reviews of food scholarship in Progress in Human Geography have begun to engage with racial identity but have not considered the breadth of work on the subject. Once we look outside what is known as agri-food studies to research in international development, environmental history, feminist theory, cultural studies and anthropology, it is evident that a large body of research exists relating race to the production, distribution and consumption of food. However, to see how this work actually refers to race often requires reading between the lines. Authors may refer to ‘difference’, ‘alterity’ or ‘Otherness’ instead of race and some are not explicit about the theory of race upon which they draw. Consequently, it is not always evident how race matters to the study of food. This paper’s contribution is to propose how theories of race are being used in this literature. It does so by drawing on the work of geographers, but the paper seeks to engage with research outside the discipline as well. Most literature implicitly relies on the social construction of race to consider representations and performances of race in contexts of eating or producing food. A smaller body of work theorizes racial embodiment as a material process. Explicit engagement with the concept of race and its diverse theoretical foundations is important because it allows scholars to make arguments about how racism shapes food systems, to understand how race changes through food, and to consider how food might enable different theorizations of race.

The drivers of greenhouse gas emissions: What do we learn from local case studies?

Abstract What can local case studies contribute to our understanding of the processes underlying the growth in greenhouse gas emissions? Since much abatement and mitigation are local in character, it is important that policy makers identify the mix of local, national and international processes that contribute to changes in greenhouse gas emissions. Drawing upon the results of case studies in Kansas, North Carolina and Ohio, how patterns of emissions in local areas can be connected analytically to the driving forces of environmental change is demonstrated. Emissions at the local level are empirically associated with the same set of trends found at national and international scale, namely, changes in population, affluence‐consumption and technology.

Geographies of food: 'Afters'

This third and final ‘Geographies of food’ review is based on an online blog conversation provoked by the first and second reviews in the series (Cook et al., 2006; 2008a). Authors of the work featured in these reviews — plus others whose work was not but should have been featured — were invited to respond to them, to talk about their own and other people’s work, and to enter into conversations about — and in the process review — other/new work within and beyond what could be called ‘food geographies’. These conversations were coded, edited, arranged, discussed and rearranged to produce a fragmentary, multi-authored text aiming to convey the rich and multi-stranded content, breadth and character of ongoing food studies research within and beyond geography.

“Properly, with love, from scratch” Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution

Setting his sights on Huntington, West Virginia, acclaimed British chef and food activist Jamie Oliver set off last fall to change how America eats, one lunch at a time. This revolution was televised, airing on ABC beginning in late March 2010. Over six episodes, Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution (JOFR) told the story of his work in this city — dubiously named the “unhealthiest city” in the United States1 — to reshape eating behaviors and, in so doing, mitigate the high rates of dietrelated morbidity and mortality characterizing the area. Oliver’s Food Revolution Web site claims, “This food revolution is about saving America’s health by changing the way you eat . . . it’s not just a TV show, it’s a movement for you, your family and your community.”2 Oliver directed attention to an issue the public finds extremely compelling — food quality and its effects on health — and from the attention the show has received, it appears he inspired many viewers.3 However, much as U.S. consumption may need attention, the extent to which a reality show can change the food system is under debate.4 More importantly, we are troubled by elements of Oliver’s “revolution,” specifically, its similarity to past efforts, the use of shaming, the show’s race politics, its arbitrary designation of authentic food, and JOFR’s promotion of heroic over collective action. These problematic elements are also evident in the broader public debate and in U.S. food politics.5 For those who have not seen the series, the cameras follow Oliver as he warns community members of the dire futures awaiting those who fail to change their

Must everything be called “food justice?”

Justice claims arise out of what Iris Marion Young (1997, 151) characterised as the five faces of oppression (exploitation, marginalisation, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence), that correspond, sometimes singularly or multiply, to variations in oppressive structures. In contesting disparities in the social order, characterised as misrecognition, misrepresentation and maldistribution (Fraser 2008), people identify ways to vanquish harm that are affirmative (leaving structures in place) or transformative (Fraser 1995). It was from this theory of justice that Valentine Cadieux and I (Cadieux and Slocum 2015; Slocum and Cadieux 2015) made our arguments about the meaning and practice of food justice in the US context. We disputed the notion that the utilitarian, libertarian, egalitarian, and/or communitarian versions of justice deployed by the local food movement acknowledged relational difference and were transformative of oppressive structures. Given these many theories of justice, it is critical to analyze how the universal becomes situated and which theory lies implicit in the cases we study (DuPuis, Harrison, and Goodman 2011; Harrison 2011; Besky 2015). Absent such clarity, the term becomes a depoliticising agent, as the editors of this superb special issue cogently point out. In the US, the concept of food justice rose out of a mobilisation against structural racism in the food system and the whiteness of the local food movement. Stating that race is relevant to understanding injustice in food systems hardly constrains others’ analyses. Indeed, in Hong Kong, Megan Blake points out that while colonial whiteness created a “supermarketized” foodscape, shunting off the distasteful wet markets to the margins, it was the Chinese embrace of neoliberalism and globalised capitalism that solidified this trend and reinforced food insecurity. Chinese elites adopted the colonisers’ approach to food provisioning, disdaining the wet markets and going a step further by removing rice quotas that had protected the poor. A raced past and present, enabled by colonialism and capitalism, created forms of elite life. The question is, how do race and racism morph? Where does race continue to divide and attract, creating vulnerability and advantage, and where do its energies dissipate? As Blake indicates, Sino supremacy created racialized distinctions and disadvantage for Nepali and Filipinx people in the post colony as the colonial racial formation receded. The efforts to shut the Hong Kong wet markets were met with resistance by the populace. In contrast, Moya Kneafsey et al., consider garden projects in light of “quiet sustainability” in which people share, repair, gift, barter, and care without seeing themselves as doing anything political toward societal transformation (2017, 623). They point out that debates over how far such acts go remain unsettled: some find community gardening contributes to integration and creates the conditions of possibility for collective change, while others see gardens thriving inside intact vicious and pastoral systems. The authors remind us that realising food justice is understood in terms of marginalised communities gaining control over their food system, which often requires capacity building. Exercising some control over your life by growing food has positive personal and sometimes communal benefit. As in the US, the reality of the grant cycle is a reason for UK nonprofits to engage in support of this quiet work. The trouble is, nonprofits must accommodate funders’ view of the world which, in setting the boundaries of what counts as truth, often does violence to the project