Towards care-full food justice: the role of experiential knowledge of food insecurity in food governance

Keywords: food justice, participatory governance, lived experience, food insecurity, ethics of care
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 25

Abstract

For some time academics, practitioners and policy makers in the UK and globally have been interested in exploring the different angles of lived experience of food insecurity. Numerous works rooted in anti-poverty scholarship or feminist and participatory research have been fuelled by the ambition to ensure that the voice of lived experience is represented through our work. More recently, and more loudly, we are also hearing calls demanding direct participation of food insecure people in decision making that impacts them, in order to address long-standing inequities in decision making processes to achieve food justice (Loo 2014, Cadieux & Slocum, 2015), including in local food partnerships and policy councils (Moragues-Faus 2019).


Building on the work of scholar-activists problematising food justice on the international, national and regional levels of food governance (Maughan et al. 2020, Moragues-Faus 2021, Smaal et al. 2021), in this paper I will examine how the democratic aspect of food justice has been mobilised and enacted in food partnerships that have been involving ‘experts by experience’ and what can it tell us about building more just food systems. Drawing on research with UK-based food poverty alliances, including ethnography and interviews with experts by experience, practitioners and decision makers, I will investigate participation through the social, economic and participatory dimensions of social justice and propose an enhanced notion of food justice including ethics of care (Tronto 1993) that will help to navigate some of the classed, racialised and gendered injustices reproduced and resisted in participatory food governance spaces.