Hope and local food activism in a North Wales town: a conceptual and ethnographic study

West, Rosemary Heather

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to examine the relationship between hope and local food growing projects within a sustainability context. Hope has often been overlooked or dismissed as naïve in sociological and political discourse, while interstitial political practices, of which local food growing projects are one example, which focus on everyday concerns have tended to be under-researched. It is to these fields that this thesis contributes. I ask how local food growing projects nurture and develop hope as part of a wider response to sustainability issues, and how these projects might inspire and maintain hopeful action, both in terms of the projects themselves and within a wider context. I do so to illuminate the value of hope within a sustainability context, and to show how paying attention to what “small facts say about big issues” (Gibson-Graham, 2014) can give insight into the significant impact that small-scale collective actions can have. Ethnographic research into this type of interstitial activism is also typically uncommon, and so this thesis contributes to this gap in knowledge by using an in-depth qualitative case study of local food growing group, Incredible Edible Abermor. Through this I show that interstitial practices, and food growing especially, have important, if modest, transformative potential within a sustainability context. They inspire hope through a sense of community, empowerment, and even nostalgia, which encouraging participants to maintain hopeful action within the project, as well as to develop wider interests and sensibilities oriented towards sustainability and environmental issues. Importantly, hopeful action and attitudes are not examples of naïve optimism to be overlooked but are instead powerful and necessary responses to contemporary environmental issues.

Citation

West, R. H. (2023). Hope and local food activism in a North Wales town: a conceptual and ethnographic study. (Thesis). Keele University

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Jul 19, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 19, 2023
• Award Date: 2023-06