ABSTRACT
The primary aim of this book is to explore connections between activist debates about food sovereignty and academic debates about alternative food networks (AFNs). AFNs are ideas and actions that in some way subvert or contest industrial capitalist foodways, such as urban farming, Community Supported Agriculture, agroecology, fair trade and so on, while continuing to work within its interstices. Similarly, food sovereignty emerged as a concept in activist circles (and only later in academia and policy) to describe the project of carving out separate or at least partially autonomous spaces for the production, exchange and consumption of food. In the context of this book, this means food projects based on a diversity of alternatives to industrial capitalist forms of accumulation and reproduction, representation and meaning, many of which ‘transgress’ into mainstream capitalist spaces (Goodman and Sage 2014). The chapters seek to capture this diversity and highlight the dynamic and contested politics of constructing alternative or counterhegemonic spaces, a politics that is perpetually reshaped through everyday encounters including that between the researcher and his or her participants.
