In recent years, farmers markets have been widely understood to be solutions to many of the complex social challenges embedded within in a flawed American agri-food system. The farmers market as a cultural institution, unique urban geography, and economic formation has been situated at the intersection of discourses about food insecurity and environmental degradation—often as a solution that is mutually beneficial for sellers, consumers, and the urban locales in which markets are frequently organized. However, farmers markets largely maintain dependencies upon cultural-economic techniques of valuation that are structured by a capitalist profit imperative, effectively limiting their ability to embody the radically progressive politics that are central to the food and environmental justice movements. This paper argues that popular constructions of the farmers market represent an orthodoxy that has significantly constrained the public and activist imagination with regard to developing more effective food-based poverty alleviation strategies and meaningful interventions in the unsustainability of urban ecologies.
About the presenterJ. Nikol Beckham
I am broadly interested in the various intersections of cultural economy, popular material culture, media studies, and visual culture. Currently, this hybrid intellectual space is finding expression in my research in critical food studies. I am fascinated by everyday cultural practices, how they are implicated in relations of power–-how racism, classism, sexism, heteronormativity and religious intolerance, for example, exist as particular expressions of power that are often subtle, mutable, complexly interrelated, easily justified and seemingly innocuous.