Colin Anderson

Broad analyses of social change often overlook the lived experiences of rural Indigenous communities. This paper connects historical agroecology with Participatory Action Research, through collective memory and historical analysis, to examine agroecological transitions in Indigenous communities in Ecuador and Bolivia. The study uses decolonial inquiry to investigate how historical events and sociocultural dynamics shape contemporary food systems, employing river-of-life exercises (with 25 and 27 participants, respectively), 15 interviews per country, participant observation, and archival research. Results highlight that reciprocity-based customary institutions guide social and ecological dynamics shaping landscape and connecting the local to broader solidarity economies. Findings reveal that Caliata adopts a transformative, self-determined path, while Chigani Alto follows an incremental, reformist trajectory within institutional structures. These cases confirm that agroecological transitions are historically grounded and culturally rooted, the ancestral “past” is present. We propose that this approach to Historical Agroecology provides a replicable, culturally appropriate framework for guiding food system transitions.

With more organizations committing their policies to sustainable and inclusive agricultural development, it becomes important to understand the underlying meaning, politics, and intentions that underpin these policy goals. Agroecology offers a comprehensive agenda for transforming the food system toward more equitable, sustainable, and self-reliant communities. Food system development discourse appears to mediate agroecological possibilities, yet we lack methodological and theoretical approaches through which to evaluate this. With this research, we combined Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) with a typology of agroecological discourse to analyze the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) policy on self-reliance. We tested this approach on the self-reliance policy framework because, depending on how self-reliance is discursively positioned, it can align with agroecological transformation. Findings reveal how the United States’ emphasis on inclusivity, locally driven agendas, and environmental concerns could be entry points for agroecology. However, through careful reading using CDA and the agroecological typology, our analysis reveals how USAID’s discourse suggests a highly problematic environment for supporting agroecology that forecloses on agroecology’s multifunctional outcomes by prioritizing market-led and technocratic development approaches. Our research contributes theoretically and methodologically by revealing how our unique approach could be extended to identify agroecological possibilities in seemingly aligned texts and to evaluate agroecological alignment in policy discourse that explicitly prioritizes agroecology.

Agroecology has been proposed as a key building block for food sovereignty. This article examines the meaning, practices and potentials of ‘transformative agroecology learning’ as a collective strategy for food system transformation. Our study is based on our qualitative and action research with the European Coordination of Via Campesina to develop the European Agroecology Knowledge Exchange Network. This network is linked to the global network of La Via Campesina and builds on the strong experiences and traditions of popular education in Latin American peasant movements. Rather than focusing on agroecology education as a process of individual learning, we analyse how a transformative agroecology education can be strengthened as a critical repertoire of action used by social movements to advance food sovereignty. Our analysis contributes a new theory of transformative agroecology learning based on four key characteristics or qualities: horizontalism; diálogo de saberes ; combining practical and political knowledge; and building social movement networks. While these different elements of transformative agroecology learning were present across EAKEN, they were unevenly developed and, in many cases, not systematized. The framework can help to strategically and reflexively systematize and strengthen a transformative agroecology learning approach as a key building block for food sovereignty.

Local sustainable food systems have captured the popular imagination as a progressive, if not radical, pillar of a sustainable food future. Yet these grassroots innovations are embedded in a dominant food regime that reflects productivist, industrial, and neoliberal policies and institutions. Understanding the relationship between these emerging grassroots efforts and the dominant food regime is of central importance in any transition to a more sustainable food system. In this study, we examine the encounters of direct farm marketers with food safety regulations and other government policies and the role of this interface in shaping the potential of local food in a wider transition to sustainable agri-food systems. This mixed methods research involved interview and survey data with farmers and ranchers in both the USA and Canada and an in-depth case study in the province of Manitoba. We identified four distinct types of interactions between government and farmers: containing, coopting, contesting, and collaborating. The inconsistent enforcement of food safety regulations is found to contain progressive efforts to change food systems. While government support programs for local food were helpful in some regards, they were often considered to be inadequate or inappropriate and thus served to coopt discourse and practice by primarily supporting initiatives that conform to more mainstream approaches. Farmers and other grassroots actors contested these food safety regulations and inadequate government support programs through both individual and collective action. Finally, farmers found ways to collaborate with governments to work towards mutually defined solutions. While containing and coopting reflect technologies of governmentality that reinforce the status quo, both collaborating and contesting reflect opportunities to affect or even transform the dominant regime by engaging in alternative economic activities as part of the ‘politics of possibility’. Developing a better understanding of the nature of these interactions will help grassroots movements to create effective strategies for achieving more sustainable and just food systems.

In this dissertation, I re-examine the relationship between knowledge and virtue in Plato's dialogues. I argue that "knowledge" in the dialogues is not defined in opposition to "desire" but rather involves "desire" as a constitutive component and that "knowledge" has affective and "erotic" aspects. As a point of reference, I examine Aristotle's brief arguments against the Socratic identification of episteme and arete. I argue that they rest on epistemological and psychological assumptions that Socrates need not accept: viz., a differentiation between "theoretical" and "practical" knowledge, and a differentiation between the faculty of thought and of desire. If these presuppositions are rejected, then "knowledge" in the Platonic dialogues is "prior" to a distinction between "theory" and "practice." In the third chapter, I defend this view through an examination of knowledge in the Socratic dialogues as a determinate disposition which has both discursive and non-discursive manifestations. I first show that this is true for common examples of tekhne, and second that there is no evidence that it does not equally hold for moral "knowledge." This requires, however, a re-interpretation of the place of the elenkhos in the Socratic practice of philosophia. We must not be misled by the centrality of definitions in the elenkhos, to conclude that "knowledge" is adequately described as propositional knowledge. Instead, the object of "knowledge" is a being, and hence "knowledge" is "non-propositional." The second part of this dissertation contains some preliminary attempts to develop this analysis of "knowledge" and to forestall some possible objections. In the fourth chapter I examine the three passages in which Socrates differentiates between a "maker's" and a "user's" knowledge and I show that the "knowledge" which Socrates identifies with "wisdom" unifies theoretical and practical comportments. The fifth chapter contains an examination of the dependence of knowledge on the education of our desires in the Republic. In the final chapter I show how this conception of "knowledge" understood as the telos of philosophia determines philosophical practice through an examination of the relationship between desire and dialectic in the Phaedo.