Legal Geography, Legal-Policy Archaeology, and the US Farm Bill

Keywords: legal geography, US Farm Bill, nutrition policy, legal-policy archaeology
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 4

Abstract

Work in legal geographies highlights how both geography and the law are not ‘natural phenomena’ and instead are produced through formalized rules, categorizations and distinctions, assumptions, and the selective uptake of ‘facts’ and concepts (Kedar, 2003). This framework allows us to examine historical evolutions and particular socio-geographic contexts of legal actions (Forest, 2000) and their constitutive social relations and institutional worlds (Delaney, Ford, & Blomley, 2001). Drawing from Gorman’s (2017, 2018) work bringing in the legal archaeology method into legal geographic inquiries, this paper examines changes in the Nutrition Titles of the 2014 and 2018 United States Farm Bills while concurrently elucidating a legal-policy archaeology methodology specific to geographic research. Programs within these specific Farm Bills are a stark change from previous legislation, as previous Nutrition Title programs have traditionally focused on hunger alleviation and welfare benefits, which recent shifts towards individual circumstances and incentivizing changes in eating behavior and food purchasing. I utilize the legal-policy archaeology through archival research and key informant interviews, to trace the historical policy antecedents to these changes alongside the different social relations and processes within their historical contexts to show how the focus on nutrition incentives came to be institutionalized within the Farm Bill. The attendance to this politics of scale framing (Kurtz, 2003) allows for an examination of the shifting scales of intervention of nutrition policy, particularly why it is now the individual body that has become the site of current policy solutions.