Land Skills Fair: This is What Diversity Looks Like!
By Chris Maughan, Agroecology Now!
With a deliberate emphasis on BPOC and also LGBTQ+ communities, the Land Skills Fair took seriously the inseparable connection between ecological diversity and political, social and cultural diversity.
Down with Innovation! Long live rights, agency and justice
By Chris Maughan, Colin Anderson, Agroecology Now!
“Innovation” is ubiquitous as a way to describe beneficial societal change. Yet, the innovation language is deeply tied to a technology-centric and top-down ways of thinking that shackles the imagination and limits the pathways for change.
Reflecting on ORFC 2021: Blinking into the Light – Galvanising Food Movements in Troubling Times
By George McAllister, Patrick Mulvaney, Nina Moeller, Colin Anderson, Chris Maughan, Agroecology Now!
And so, as we emerge blinking into the light, from behind our lockdown screens, it is with an invigorated vision of the world we’re collectively striving to build. We have much to do, but grounds to be positive.
No Time for Justice?! – Food Policy and Emergency Thinking in the Brexit Moment
By Chris Maughan, Colin Anderson, Moya Kneafsey, Agroecology Now!
Imagine a process in which food and farming policies were designed with social justice as the central tenet. What would such a process look like? Whose voices would be heard, and whose interests would be represented? What questions would need to be asked and how would we know that social justice had been addressed?
TyT Field Dispatches: ‘I Remember When All This was Bare Earth’
By Chris Maughan, People's Knowledge
One standout issue this time was how much joy I felt (and others appeared to feel) on being in the field, gathering on the farm, and (especially) being in the field that had greater diversity. All this is missing from our results. The conventional measures we use aren’t particularly good at reflecting the process of research, which – in citizen science at least – is arguably so much more important than ‘results’.
The Dark Side of Innovation for Family Farmers: Reflections on an International Symposium on Innovation
By Chris Maughan, Agroecology Now!
This post explores rapid rise to prominence of the term ‘Innovation’ within agricultural development, and presents some reasons why it is an inadequate framework to address the deep injustices in contemporary food systems, especially as they relate to family farmers and other small scale food producers.