The Second Annual Meeting of the Integrated Network for Social Sustainability takes place in Charlotte North Carolina between the 4th and 6th of April, and Jonathan Hankins will be there to represent the Bassetti Foundation and present during the poster session.

Prepared together with long term Foundation Collaborator Cristina Grasseni, Hankins will present a poster entitled Food Sovereignty and Social Innovation Through Solidarity Economy Networks. The joint authors will present work-in-progress insights into solidarity economies as a form of active citizenship that orient responsible social innovation toward economic sovereignty and social sustainability.

Based on a one-year project funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and previous research (Grasseni Beyond Alternative Food Networks, Bloomsbury 2013), the poster will focus on provisioning activism – a phenomenon that is growing transnationally, often without reciprocal knowledge or coordination.

The full abstract for the poster is available here:

Building on our roles of foreign correspondent for the Bassetti Foundation for responsible innovation and social researcher, we will present work-in-progress insights into solidarity economies as a form of active citizenship that orient social innovation toward economic sovereignty and social sustainability. Based on a one-year project funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and previous research (Grasseni Beyond Alternative Food Networs, Bloomsbury 2013), the poster will focus on provisioning activism – a phenomenon that is growing transnationally, often without reciprocal knowledge or coordination.

A comparative agenda for studying emerging grassroots economic practices in Europe and the USA was presented at the recent UNRISD conference on Limits and Potentials of Social and Solidarity Economies (Grasseni, Forno & Signori 2013). Solidarity economy is variously interpreted and appropriated: from bulk-buying collectives to food coops, from urban community gardens to community-supported agriculture; from the development of small workers’ cooperatives to ambitious plans to create “green” jobs for marginalized youth in postindustrial wastelands.

On the basis of ethnographic observation, the poster focuses on similarities and differences, limits and potentials of social and solidarity economies in Lombardy (Italy) and Massachusetts (USA): investment on food justice and youth empowerment, participatory guarantee systems, attempts at re-localizing entire food supply chains.

We argue that SSE can help widen our understanding of the concept of sovereignty in relation to provisioning, especially in the light of recent literature on “food sovereignty” and “food democracy”. Food access and food justice is a recurrent theme for social contestation within solidarity economy circles. The poster will analyze the interplay of multiple anthropological issues in the way the concept of “sovereignty” is appropriated by food activists: including trust, representation, and collective ownership.

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(Photo: Woven Heaven, Tangled Earth detail (modified) by Katy Silberger from Flickr)

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