Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective (8th Edition)
Philip McMichael 
Heloise Weber 

Development and Social Change explores the historical, socio-political, and ecological aspects of development. The Eighth Edition critically engages with the concept of development, tracing its roots and examining its implications in the contemporary world. Authors Philip McMichael and Heloise Weber use case studies and examples to help describe a complex world in transition. Students are encouraged to see global development as a contested historical project. By showing how development stems from unequal power relationships between and among peoples and states, often with planet-threatening environmental outcomes, it enables readers to reflect on the possibilities for more just social, ecological and political relations.

Titans of Industrial Agriculture: How a Few Giant Corporations Came to Dominate the Farm Sector and Why It Matters
Jennifer Clapp

How a small handful of giant transnational corporations has come to dominate the farm inputs sector, why it matters, and what can be done about it. Every year, hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of farm machinery, fertilizer, seeds, and pesticides are sold to farmers around the world. Although agricultural inputs are a huge sector of the global economy, the lion’s share of that market is controlled by a relatively small number of very large transnational corporations. The high degree of concentration among these agribusiness titans is striking, considering that just a few hundred years ago agricultural inputs were not even marketed goods. In Titans of Industrial Agriculture, Jennifer Clapp explains how we got from there to here, outlining the forces that enabled this extreme concentration of power and the entrenchment of industrial agriculture. Clapp reveals that the firms that rose to the top of these sectors benefited from distinct market, technology, and policy advantages dating back a century or more that enabled them to expand their businesses through mergers and acquisitions that made them even bigger and more powerful. These dynamics matter because the firms at the top have long shaped industrial farming practices that, in turn, have generated enormous social, ecological, and health impacts on the planet and the future of food systems. Beyond analyzing how these problems have arisen and manifested, the book examines recent efforts to address corporate power and dominance in food systems and assesses the prospects for change. Among the first works to examine deep roots of corporate power in agriculture, Titans of Industrial Agriculture helps illuminate just how corporate actors have encouraged the “lock-in” of industrial agriculture, despite all its known social and ecological costs.

Tanzania’s Land Rush – A Zero-sum Game: Farmland Investments in Tanzania
Joanny Bélair

Agri-investments often live through political regimes, and in cases of radical political change, the hopes of investors may be thwarted by unforeseen events and dynamics. With its recent turbulent political history, Tanzania offers unique opportunity to investigate the multi-layered and changing politics of farmland investments. Joanny Bélair has taken up this task in her research and recent book “Tanzania’s Land Rush”, from which she reports. Joanny is currently research manager for the Canadian Bureau for International Education but was previously a research fellow at Utrecht University, working closely with LANDac. Her research agenda is focused on the political economy surrounding farmland investments in sub-Saharan Africa and their long-term resilience impacts on rural communities.

Eating Is an English Word
Annemarine Mol

Eating is generally understood as a human need that people satisfy in diverse ways. Eating, however, is also an English word. Other languages, using other words, order reality differently: they may fuse eating with breathing, or distinguish chupar from comer. Anthropologists flag up such differences by leaving a few of their words untranslated, but what language do we think in? This isn’t necessarily English. We may be linguistically closer to those whose practices we study: them. Against this background, Eating Is an English Word argues that social scientists should let go of the dream of universal concepts. Our analytical terms had better vary. Annemarie Mol and her coauthors exemplify this in a series of material semiotic inquiries into eating practices. They employ terms like lekker, tasting with fingers, chupar, schmecka, gustar, and settling on an okay meal to explore appreciative modes of valuing. Welcome, then, to spirited stories about satisfied stomachs, love for a lamb, juicy fruit treats, and companionable lunches and dinners.

The (not so) Secret Lives of Food Packaging 
Anne Murcott 

Tracing developments from the classical period to the early industrial revolution and beyond, Anne Murcott provides us with an accessible and entertaining social history of food packaging. From tin cans, glass jars and bottles, plastic trays and stretch-wrap, Murcott shows the importance of food packaging for global food systems. As a pioneering excursion into the many aspects of the history of food packaging, the book examines shifts from domestic to commercial production, the emergence of associated technologies, changes in retailing, implications for policy and practice, along with current concerns about overpackaging. Taking a wide historical and geographical angle, Murcott draws on sources such as trade magazines, manufacturers’ archives, company histories, packaging textbooks, histories of international trade and interviews with key industry ‘insiders’. Written by a leading figure in the field, this book will benefit students of social studies of food production and consumption, of cultural studies, as well as researchers and those interested in the history of food.

Organizing Food, Faith and Freedom: Imagining Alternatives
Ozan Alakavuklar

Consumerism, unsustainable growth, waste and inequalities continue to ail societies across the globe, but creative collectives have been tackling these issues at a grassroots level. Based on an autoethnographic study about a free food store in Aotearoa New Zealand, this book presents a first-hand account of how a community is organized around surplus food to deal with food poverty, while also helping the reader to see through the complexity that brings the free food store to life. Examining how alternative economies and relations emerge from these community solutions, the author shows it is possible to think, act and organize differently within and beyond capitalist dynamics.

Societal Deception: Global Social Issues in Post-Truth Times
Geoffrey Lawrence

This book provides a comprehensive overview of ‘societal deception’ – how and why people are deceived and led to believe fake news. Coherently blending critical political economy and sociology, the author provocatively examines how corporations, political parties, the media, think tanks, and assorted ‘influencers’ seek to manipulate public opinion to achieve their goals. This book spans an array of contemporary topics and issues not normally tackled by a single writer – the media, genetic engineering, fast food, environmental pollution, climate change, economic inequality, political manipulations, sports, and religion. While critical in subject matter and replete with easily accessible and reliable sources, this book is highly readable and entertaining for the general and academic audience interested in current global issues.

Everyday Agri-Environmental Governance: the Emergence of Sustainability through Assemblage Thinking
Jérémie Forney, Dana Bentia and Angga Dwiartama

The book reflects on our theoretical journey with assemblage thinking over the past six years and the three cases we offered as an empirical reflection in Switzerland, the Donau Soy, and Indonesia. It is an open-access book, so we’re happy to share it with wider networks.

Seeds of Occupation, Seeds of Possibility 
Andrea Brower 

This publication examines the “the social and historical conditions by which the chemical-seed oligopoly came to occupy the most geographically isolated islands in the world and made the soils of Hawaiʻi the epicenter of agrochemical and agricultural biotechnology testing” (West Virginia University Press). The book is available as a paperback or eBook. 

Food Resistance Movements: Journeying Through Alternative Food Networks  
Ferne Edwards 

Edwards presents almost two decades of work on food waste (Australia), the food sovereignty movement (Venezuela), and autonomous food spaces (Catalonia), with reflections on urban food system transitions, in this publication. She has dedicated this book to Jane Dixon, her PhD supervisor and friend, and Paul Martin, a close friend who introduced her to dumpster diving and food activism in general. The book is available as a hardcover or eBook.

Beyond Global Food Supply Chains: Crisis, Disruption, Regeneration
Victoria Stead and Melinda Hinkson (Eds) 

 Edited by Victoria Stead and Melinda Hinkson, this publication takes the upheaval of the pandemic as a springboard from which to interrogate a larger set of structural, environmental and political fault lines running through the global food system. In a context in which disruptions to the production, distribution and consumption of food are figured as exceptions to the smooth, just-in-time efficiencies of global supply chains, the essays examine the pandemic not simply as a particular and acute moment of disruption but rather as a lens on a deeper, longer set of structural processes within which disruption is endemic. The thirteen chapters offer short, sharp interventions that track disruptive forces & political possibilities at key points along the global food supply chain – and, critically, beyond it. They traverse subjects ranging from agri-investment to corporate and alternative food production systems, labour relations, pandemic supermarkets, logistics systems, the politics of hunger, the limits of consumer ethics, and the possibilities of supply chain disruptions as moments of reprieve. They offer rich, generative reflections on the contemporary global food system, and would also be very well suited to being used as teaching resources.

Chapters

1. Introduction: Beyond global supply chains by Melinda Hinkson and Victoria Stead
2. Supply chains as disruption by Lauren Rickards and Melinda Hinkson
3. Agri-investment cashing in on COVID-19 by Sarah Sippel
4. Putting the crisis to work by Victoria Stead and Kirstie Petrou
5. Going against the grain in the West Australian wheatbelt by Kelly Donati
6. Reviving community agrarianism in post-socialist China by Daren Shi-Chi-Leung
7. Fantasies of logistics in Aotearoa New Zealand by Matthew Henry and Carolyn Morris
8. Reproducing hunger in pandemic America by Maggie Dickinson
9. The pandemic supermarket by David Boarder Giles
10. Disruption as reprieve? by Jon Altman and Francis Markham
11. The UN Food Systems Summit: Disaster capitalism and the future of food by Tomaso Ferrando
12. Against consumer ethics by Christopher Mayes and Angie Sassano
13. Afterword: Temporary measures by Alex Blanchette

The book is available free to download here.

Agri-environmental Governance as an Assemblage. Multiplicity, Power, and Transformation 
Jérémie Forney, Chris Rosin, Hugh Campbell (Eds)

Features
Develops assemblage theory as an original analytical framework for the study of agri-environmental governance.
Presents alternative perspectives on the kind of governance instruments that support the development of more sustainable agriculture and food systems.
Includes a wide range of international examples, including case studies from south-east and east Asia, Europe, Latin America, New Zealand and the USA.

 Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Agri-Environmental Governance as Assemblage
   Jérémie Forney, Chris Rosin and Hugh Campbell

Part I: Assembling Ontologies: Multiplicities and Agencies

2. Assembling Payments for Ecosystem Services in Wales
   Sophie Wynne-Jones and Thomas Vetter
3. Carolina Dreamin’: A case for understanding farmers’ decision-making and hybrid agri-environmental governance initiatives as complex assemblages
   Caela O’Connell and Deanna L. Osmond
4. Killing two (or more) birds with one stone: The case of governance through multifunctionality payments in Japan
   Haruhiko Iba and Kiyohiko Sakamoto
5. Assembling Halloumi: Contesting the EU’s Food Quality Label Policy in the Republic of Cyprus
   Gisela Welz
6. From ‘disciplinary societies’ to ‘societies of control’: an historical narrative of agri-environmental governance in Indonesia
   Angga Dwiartama

Part II: The politics of territorialisation

7. Assembling Value in Carbon Forestry: Practices of Assemblage, Overflows and Counter-Performativities in Ugandan Carbon Forestry
   Adrian Nel
8. Not Defined by the Numbers: Distinction, Dissent and Democratic Possibilities in Debating the Data
   Karly Burch, Katharine Legun, and Hugh Campbell
9. Water Quality Deterioration, Governance, and Assemblage Responses in Uruguay
   Diego Thompson
10. The “Dirty Dairying” Campaign in New Zealand: Constructing Problems and Assembling Responses
    Ismaël Tall and Hugh Campbell
11. Beyond Soyisation – Donau Soja as Assemblage
    Dana Bentia and Jérémie Forney

Part III: Assemblage for building new AEG practices

12. The Politics of Big Data: Corporate Agri-food Governance meets “Weak” Resistance
    Michael Carolan
13. Assemblage and the Epistemology of Practice: Imagining Situated Water Governance
    Ruth Beilin

Published by Routledge / Earthscan Food and Agriculture.

Anzac Biscuits -The power and spirit of an everyday national icon
Allison Reynolds

Anzac biscuits, baked in Australia and New Zealand for over a century, have a powerful connection to the national identity and culture of both countries. But what is the story of this national icon? Were they eaten by troops during the First World War? When did coconut make an appearance? And where do you stand on the crispy versus chewy debate?

Culinary detective Allison Reynolds has travelled Australia, New Zealand and England delving into war files and family cookbooks to investigate the provenance of this extraordinary everyday biscuit.

Published by Wakefield Press.

Food Utopias: Reimagining citizenship, ethics, and community
Paul Stock, Michael Carolan and Christopher Rosin

Food is a contentious and emotive issue, subject to critiques from multiple perspectives. Alternative food movements – including the different articulations of local, food miles, seasonality, food justice, food knowledge and food sovereignty – consistently invoke themes around autonomy, sufficiency, cooperation, mutual aid, freedom, and responsibility.

In this stimulating and provocative book the authors link these issues to utopias and intentional communities. Using a food utopias framework presented in the introduction, they examine food stories in three interrelated and complementary ways: utopias as critique of existing systems; utopias as engagement with experimentation of the novel, the forgotten, and the hopeful in the future of the food system; and utopias as process that recognizes the time and difficulty inherent in changing the status quo.

The chapters address theoretical aspects of food utopias and also present case studies from a range of contexts and regions, including Argentina, Italy, Switzerland and USA. These focus on key issues in contemporary food studies including equity, locality, the sacred, citizenship, community and food sovereignty. Food utopias offers ways forward to imagine a creative and convivial food system.

Ethical Trade, Gender and Sustainable Liveliboods: Women Smallholders and Ethicality in Kenya
Kiah Smith

Fair and ethical trade is often criticized for being highly gendered, and for institutionalizing the ethical values of consumers, the priorities of NGOs and governments, and most of all, food retailers. But little is known about how women smallholder farmers experience diverse ethical standards, or whether and how standards reflect their values, local cultural and environmental contexts, or priorities for achieving sustainable livelihoods.

Linking gender, smallholder livelihoods and global ethical trade regulations, this book reveals that multiple understandings of social justice, environmental sustainability and well-being – or ethicality – exist in parallel to those institutionalized in ethical trade schemes. Through an in-depth case study of smallholder subsistence and French bean farming in Kenya, the book grounds the analysis of livelihoods, gender and ethical trade in women smallholders’ perspectives, links the macro level of markets with the micro level of livelihoods, and engenders relations of power, structure and agency in food networks. It brings together disparate bodies of theory to illustrate the knowledge, strategies and values of women smallholder farmers that are often beyond the scope of ethical trade regulations. It also provides a challenging new vision for doing food systems research.

Community Gardening as Social Action
Claire Nettle
Series : Transforming Environmental Politics and Policy: 2

There has been a resurgence of community gardening over the past decade with a wide range of actors seeking to get involved, from health agencies aiming to increase fruit and vegetable consumption to radical social movements searching for symbols of non-capitalist ways of relating and occupying space. Community gardens have become a focal point for local activism in which people are working to contribute to food security, question the erosion of public space, conserve and improve urban environments, develop technologies of sustainable food production, foster community engagement and create neighbourhood solidarity.

Drawing on in-depth case studies and social movement theory, Claire Nettle provides a new empirical and theoretical understanding of community gardening as a site of collective social action. This provides not only a more nuanced and complete understanding of community gardening, but also highlights its potential challenges to notions of activism, community, democracy and culture.

Contents: Community gardening: from leisure to social action; Garden views: seeing community gardens as sites of social change; Theorising collective action; Community gardening as activism; In the garden; Growing community; Creation: the politics of direct action and prefiguration; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

About the Author: Claire Nettle PhD is a community food systems researcher and consultant.

Reviews: ‘By showing that community gardening is often a deeply political act this book offers a profound challenge to dominant accounts of social movement activism. Nettle shows that community gardening is more than a cultural challenge and does not mean a retreat from real politics, rather it is a specific form of prefigurative activism intended to build communities anew. It is essential reading for all those with an interest in a deeper understanding of the relationship between activist strategies and everyday life practices.’
Brian Doherty, Keele University, UK