Partial attunements: Everyday environmentalism of the food sovereignty movement in İstanbul's foodscape

This thesis presents an ethnography of the everyday practices of İstanbul’s food sovereignty movement, in order to understand what it means to both refuse and be involved in the capitalist and anthropocentric political economy of the existing food regime. As a social movement consisting of everyday environmental and economic practices, İstanbul’s food sovereignty movement materially and discursively emerged in an atmosphere where neoliberalization of agriculture began to be exceedingly implemented; and accelerated after the Gezi protests through ethical and logistical experimentations of the emergent food collectives and consumer cooperatives. Drawing on 18-month fieldwork, the thesis traces these ethical and logistical experimentations in order to interpret the political potentiality they offer within the form of what I call infrastructural politics. Specifically, the thesis asks this question: To what extent is it possible to economically and ecologically reinvent İstanbul’s food infrastructure by enacting infrastructural politics? Ultimately, the thesis argues that this possibility of reinventing the elements of food infrastructure – as well as scaling these elements in time and space – is enabled by the activists’ labor of mediation – or what I call attunement – between the temporalities and scalar horizons of the existing food regime on the one hand and the practices of reclaiming and recreating these temporalities and scalar horizons on the other. In other words, İstanbul’s food sovereignty movement maintains its political existence not despite but because of its partial position within capitalist and anthropocentric forms of relations