Tuesday June 9 | 15.00 CEST | ZOOM (link will be shared after registration)

The CSPS Foodscapes Cluster warmly invites you to join this online public lecture.  Please share with others that might be interested!

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Foodscapes after Covid: from corporatism to the politics of possibility

The pandemic has served to reveal and intensify many ills of the global foodscape, from an overreliance on ‘flexible’ carbon-intensive supply chains to growing problems around food insecurity in many countries and beyond. Though the reasons for this state of affairs are numerous, our starting point here lies in tracing these problems back to growing corporate power over agri-food. Yet in offering a speculative exploration of what foodscapes ‘after Covid’ might look like, we suggest that a future pockmarked by the growing stranglehold of corporate capitalism over food is one possible future—but not an inevitability. Drawing on empirical insights from research undertaken in the United Kingdom, we follow the tactic of ‘reading for difference’ in highlighting the more critically optimistic trajectories that our foodscapes might instead take. Noting the diverse ways in which food has come to be provisioned in times of crisis, we ask: what positive glimmers can we read in recent times? What role might these different modes of provisioning play in future foodscapes? How might a radical spirit of mutual aid be sustained without being co-opted and deflected by corporate power?

Jonathan Beacham is an Economic and Social Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Bristol, with interests in ‘alternative’ economic spaces in the food system, society—environment relations and consumption.

Alice Willatt lectures at the University of Bath, holding interests in feminist care ethics, emergency food provisioning, alternative food networks, and research co-production.

Credits cover image: businessinsider.com