Transformative learning and localizing food: ingredients of knowledge creation and resistance

Throughout the world, both producers and consumers of food are critically analyzing and enacting changes away from the globalized, industrial paradigm associated with conventional practices in agriculture and food production/distribution/consumption and towards the localization of food networks. Contributing to growing resistance movements aimed at gaining greater food security and sovereignty, local food discourses are strengthened by a combination of political, socio-economic, ecological, and cultural reasoning. This critical ethnography examines how knowledge and meaning is constructed in the context of an alternative food discourse through the personal and shared experiences of six participants in rural Saskatchewan. Further, the study explores the factors that influence participants’ sense of personal and/or collective transformation. Data were collected over six months using the methods of participant interviews, a focus group, and observation. Data analysis used temporal sequencing of meaning-making factors or “ingredients” that were categorized to detail how the creation and affective use of knowledge in transformative learning occurred in the context of localizing food networks in rural Saskatchewan