4 - Fostering Food Justice in Academia and Beyond

Summary

With the escalation of various food inequalities in the UK and globally, there has been a growing interest among food scholars and practitioners in working with the concept of food justice, defining it, operationalizing it (Cadieux and Slocum, 2015; Herman et al, 2018; Coulson and Milbourne, 2020) and exploring how social justice can contribute to creating more sustainable and just food systems (Moragues Faus, 2017; Maughan et al, 2020; Smaal et al, 2021). However, not all interventions include an actual commitment to the concept through performing justice in academic and more- than- research work. In this contribution we argue that to follow (food) justice scholarship, we need to go beyond using justice as a lens in our empirical and theoretical work and explore how justice is enacted (or not) in our research, in academia and beyond. To do that, we introduce our care- full participatory justice framework, mobilizing Nancy Fraser's (2009) economic, socio- cultural and political dimensions of justice, and – following Miriam Williams’ (2017) concept of care- full justice – taking ethics of care as a building block of our reflection to interrogate the micro- dimension of our messy, everyday more- than- research activities. Blazek et al (2015) coined the term ‘more than research’ to highlight the ambivalence and in- becoming- ness of academic and non- academic outcomes to research projects, especially participatory ones. Building on this, Evans (2016) describe relationships developed with her research participants as ‘more than research’, motivated by ethics of care. Our use aims to extend its focus from outcomes and relationships with people in the field to capturing the complexities and relationships with other people in academia and beyond academia (colleagues, supervisors, students, practitioners, activists) as well as ourselves. Understanding our research activities are always already ‘more than research’ also helps to paradoxically decenter the spectacular in our research and create a space to navigate justice in all its dimensions in our more- than- research lives (and those of others) where our research is necessarily embedded. We do not endeavour to come up with a set of fool- proof techniques to achieve (food) justice in research, instead we will turn the gaze in and scrutinize our own ambiguous practices, uncomfortable contradictions and troublesome dilemmas that spill out from grant writing, interviews and analysis into our more- than- research life in the UK and beyond.