FEELING AT HOME WITH THE UNFAMILIAR: MOTIVATING PEOPLE THROUGH VISCERAL ENGAGEMENTS WITH FOOD

Includes bibliographical references (pages 138-147)Using North Philadelphia as a case study, my thesis analyzes the capacity of nonprofit organizations to generate civic participation through a place-based politics that highlights the importance of emotional, affective and visceral engagements with food. Through qualitative methods, I analyze an urban gardening project established by the African American United Fund (AAUF), a nonprofit organization in North Central Philadelphia. The capacity of this organization to motivate African Americans around food and gardening using a place-based politics of home is of particular interest. The central questions of my thesis revolve around the kind of politics such projects cultivate and why this matters to the future of an inclusive, diverse and integrated food movement. I used several methods to conduct this study, including ethnographic fieldwork, participant observation and archival research. To analyze this data, I developed a theory of internalized access to argue that people`s bodily motivations to become involved with food movements are individually experienced and socially produced. I found that the AAUF`s urban gardening project generates civic participation through a place-based politics that addresses such emotional, affective and visceral relationships to food, providing opportunities for African Americans to cultivate different racialized class subjectivities. The intellectual merit of my thesis lies in its effort to advance work on food movements within critical and social geography. Furthermore, the broader impacts of the study include its capacity to generate insights that will help nonprofits provoke structural changes in the food system through an inclusive civic participatory body