Food is the medium: food movements, social justice and the communication ecology approach

2013-07-09Amidst the many problems of the industrialized food system, issues related to food justice have emerged as particularly salient in many low-income and ethnic minority communities across the United States. This dissertation explores the potentials and pitfalls that arise as a result of contemporary American food justice efforts. It offers up the communication ecology approach, and the related method of networked ethnography, as valuable tools for understanding both why and how food justice organizations go about advancing their social justice goals through food-related activities. The project highlights the efforts of a specific South Los Angeles food justice organization – Neighborhood United – as an illustrative case study. Neighborhood United is treated as a central node within a complex network of communicative interactions – that is, actions that include not only the daily practices of the organization and its staff, but also its history, its sources of funding, its media use, and its many partnerships in agricultural production, food distribution and urban community development. Ultimately, the theoretical and methodological orientation of the dissertation leads to several key conclusions about the processes through which community-based social change might be realized. It details the complexity that emerges when an organization must work to balance the interests of its sometimes contradictory network partners. At the same time, the research demonstrates how these complicated networked formations are actually central to shaping a community-based politics of possibility for today's urban social justice movements