Cultivating Local Food: Knowledge, Power, and (Trans)Formations in American Policy and Society.

[摘要] This dissertation compares the politics of food (re)localization—the (re)making of food systems decision-making among municipal actors—in Cleveland and Detroit, USA. The data for this dissertation is qualitative and includes hundreds of primary source documents, over forty-eight hours of observation, and over seventy-two in-depth interviews. Three particular areas are ultimately addressed through this data’s analysis: (1) what local food policy looks like between places, including the actors, forms of knowledge, standards of evidence, and levels of transparency favored in governance; (2) how actors variously engage in strategic knowledge production to became authorities in each city’s local food system and food policy; and, (3) how the rise of local food governance is creating direct and indirect policy feedback effects that are together variously (re)making social understandings and action by place. In evaluating these dynamics, this dissertation comes to argue that local ways of knowing differ from each other and the national context within which they are situated; that boundary-work among and between different experiential experts helps to construct these different ways of knowing by place; and that local battles over knowledge production have significant consequences not only for governance but also society at large. This dissertation thus builds on and contributes to scholarly and practitioner notions spanning social movements, sociology of knowledge and expertise, policy studies, and food studies.

[发布机构] University of Michigan

[效力级别] policy

[关键词] knowledge;policy;social movements;food;Sociology;Social Sciences;Public Policy and Sociology