Amid the highly industrialized, export-focused food system of the Canadian prairies, some farmers and consumers are turning to localized agriculture as an alternative—they are “going local”. Despite farmers’ obvious importance to the food system, surprisingly little research has examined their motivations and reasons for localization. To date, most local food scholarship in North America has focused on either consumers’ motivations to buy local or the systemic aspects of local food, such as regulations, infrastructure, and marketing arrangements. Existing research suggests that (...) local food systems are supported by consumers’ rejection of the industrial paradigm and desire to connect with their food and its source. But what drives farmers to localize, particularly when export-focused production is firmly entrenched as the status quo? Based on interviews and focus groups with 60 farmers, processors, policy experts, and retailers in the Canadian prairie province of Saskatchewan, this paper examines local food systems from the producer perspective in a rural context of high industrialization and geographical dispersion. We examine what motivates farmers to produce for local markets, and what forces they must resist to do so. The findings indicate that farmers’ main motivations for localization are political and social in nature, and stem from a critique of the dominant neoliberal agri-food system. We map farmers’ agential responses to this dominant system on a spectrum that ranges from acceptance of a neoliberal “feed the world” ideology to promotion of food sovereignty. Drawing on farmers’ perspectives, our findings question the straightforward equation of local food with environmental sustainability and also challenge neoliberal economic assumptions of “scaling up”. (shrink)

Epistemic injustice has rapidly become a powerful tool for analysis of otherwise hidden social harms. Yet empirical research into how resistance to knowing and understanding can be generated and replicated in social programmes is limited. We have identified a range of subtle and not-so-subtle inflections of epistemic injustice as they play out in an intervention for people with chronic depression in receipt of disability benefits. This article describes the different ‘species’ of epistemic injustice observed and reveals how these are unintentionally (...) produced at frontline, management, commissioning and policy levels. Most notably, there remains a privileging of clinical knowledge over other forms of knowledge, producing a ‘pathocentric epistemic complex’. This, combined with the failure of different agencies with competing ideologies to adequately understand each other, and a vicious policy context, added to the injustices already faced by people with mental health issues, generating multiple harms. This has important implications for a range of integrated care and welfare interventions – not least by drawing attention to their unintended potential for replicating epistemic injustice as an institutionalised complex. Careful evaluation and design of such programmes, applying the philosophical and epistemic resources illustrated here, can help mitigate this outcome. Further, by raising awareness of epistemic injustice among programme participants, we can generate epistemic structures that secure programme integrity locally, and promote better policy. (shrink)

This article examines the work of three artists – Harun Farocki, Hito Steyerl and Rabih Mroué – who in different ways mobilize the cinematic device of ‘shot/countershot’ in two distinct post-cinematic contexts (the moving image installation and the performance lecture) as a tool for scrutinizing images of war and violence from divergent historical, socio-economic, geopolitical and ethical perspectives. In returning to and reworking this classical cinematic device as an experimental and essayistic mode of montage and critical reflection, all three artists, (...) as I argue, variously seek to counter the ideological naturalization and interpretive framing of representations of war and violence under conditions of digitalization and globalization, as well as to interrogate the interconnections between forms of direct, symbolic and systemic violence. (shrink)

This interview with the art historian and curator Julian Stallabrass was conducted by Alex Fletcher and Andrew Fisher over the winter of 2022–23. It takes as its point of departure Stallabrass’s recent and large-scale study Killing for Show: Photography, War, and the Media in Vietnam and Iraq (2020), in order to consider the changing ways in which images have been used to both document and to wage war. The interview explores Stallabrass’s central historical contrast between photography in the Iraq and (...) Vietnam Wars. It considers the relative critical values of photojournalism and art in their engagements with violence and what the problems and possibilities of photojournalism tell us about the wider fate of liberal notions of the public sphere. The interview ends by linking these themes in Killing for Show to the photographic mediation of current conflicts and the visual cultures of contemporary capitalism. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Angus Fletcher is one of our finest theorists of the arts, the heir to I. A. Richards, Erich Auerbach, Northrop Frye. This, his grandest book since the groundbreaking Allegory of 1964, aims to open another field of study: how thought--the act, the experience of thinking--is represented in literature. Recognizing that the field of formal philosophy is only one demonstration of the uses of thought, Fletcher looks for the ways other languages (and their framing forms) serve the purpose of certain thinking (...) activities. What kinds of thinking accompany the writing of history? How does the gnomic sentence manage to represent some point of belief? The fresh insights Fletcher achieves at every turn suggest an anatomy of poetic and fictional strategies for representing thought--the hazards, the complications, the sufferings, the romance of thought. Fletcher's resources are large, and his step is sure. The reader samples his piercing vision of Milton's Satan, the original Thinker, leaving the pain of thinking as his legacy for mankind; Marvell's mysteriously haunting "green thought in a green shade"; Old Testament and Herodotus, Vico and Coleridge; Crane, Calvino, Stevens. Fletcher ranges over the heights of literature, poetry, music, and film, never losing sight of his central line of inquiry. He includes comments on the essential role of unclear, vague, and even irrational thinking to suggest that ideas often come alive as thoughts only in a process of considerable distress. In the end he gives us literature--not the content of thought, but its form, its shape, the fugitive colors taken on by the mind as represented in art. (shrink)

Where science has often been used to explore the questions raised by art, this book does the reverse, suggesting that art can address a problem raised by science: the deep challenge to ethics posed by Darwin’s discovery that we are intentional beings living in an unintentional world. Using Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth, among others, Angus Fletcher shows how the physical experience of art can transform Darwin’s discouraging theory into a practice-based ethics that establishes pluralism, curiosity, and cooperation as the basis (...) of progressive life. (shrink)

: Despite the historical importance of Francis Bacon's grand vision of science, the doctrine of Form that supports his program of works is now generally agreed to be incoherent. This paper will argue, however, that Bacon's belief in the convertibility of matter gains a previously unacknowledged coherence when approached through the treatment of axiom conversion expressed in Ramus' 1574 Dialectica. Ultimately this will lead to the conclusion that Bacon did not--like most twentieth-century philosophers--see the universe as a collection of matter (...) understood by humans in terms of law, but as a collection of laws understood in terms of matter. (shrink)

From the late 1960s until his death in 2014, the filmmaker and artist Harun Farocki repeatedly returned in his work to the subject of labour. This article examines a selection of Farocki’s films and video installations, delineating his recurrent chronicling of the historical trajectory of the labour process and technological development under capitalist industrialisation. In particular, it focuses on Farocki’s sustained investigation into capitalism’s drive to systematically displace forms of skilled craft from the production process by subordinating both manual and (...) intellectual labour to an incremental process of deskilling and mechanisation, as well as his interrogation of the implication of various instrumental and automated visual technologies in such processes. In doing so, I underline the continuing significance of Marxist theory for analysing Farocki’s critical portrayal of capitalist modernity as dominated by an abstract and alienated historical dynamic toward the increasing rationalisation and control of production and social life. (shrink)

I shall never forget my astonishment and delight on reading the 1949 essay, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," which in turn became the Polemic Introduction to Anatomy of Criticism, and my even greater astonishment and delight at the appearance of "Towards a Theory of Cultural History" , which eventually served as Essay 1 of the Anatomy, when revised and expanded. The remarkable thing about these articles was not so much their content as their assumption, namely, that criticism (...) could at least try to become a science. This assumption was couched in the form of most general scientific orientations, in that Frye took literature in its own terms,1 to begin with, and then did not prejudicially segregate and then destroy the claims of particular "minority groups" within the whole commonwealth of literary life. I did not know it at the time, but Frye was then, as now, fighting for a mode of civil rights. He was then, as now, a libertarian. He first made his name writing on Blake— freedom enough, perhaps—but it has always seemed to me that his center is as much Milton as Blake. But then, to know Blake truly is to understand Milton. · 1. This assumption is to be distinguished from that of "early" Richards, which held that a science for literary studies had to come at literature from the outside, with chiefly psychological instruments. Richards' career has been the most complex critical "life" in our century, I believe, and it should be observed that he has held, and abandoned, more than one assumptive high ground during the course of his long and magnificent involvement with poetry. Angus Fletcher's numerous writings include Allegory: The Thought of a Symbolic Mode, The Prophetic Moment: An Essay on Spenser, The Transcendental Masque: An Essay on Milton's Comus, The Stranger God: A Theoretical Study of the Myth of Dionysus, and Thresholds: A Critical Approach to the English Renaissance. Northrop Frye's response, "Expanding Eyes" appears in the Winter 1975 issue. (shrink)

Review of: Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay (2019) London and New York: Verso, 656 pp., ISBN 978-1-78873-571-1, p/bk, £30.00.

Every time we think ahead, we are crafting a story. Every daily plan—and every political vision, social movement, scientific hypothesis, business proposal, and technological breakthrough—starts with “what if?” Linking causes to effects, considering hypotheticals and counterfactuals, asking how other people will react: these are the essence of narrative. So why do we keep overlooking story’s importance to intelligence in favor of logic? This book explains how and why our brains think in stories. Angus Fletcher, an expert in neuroscientific approaches to (...) narrative, identifies this capacity as “storythinking.” He demonstrates that storythinking is fundamental to what makes us human. Artificial intelligence can perform symbolic logic, rational deduction, and mathematical calculation, but it is incapable of deliberating in narrative. Drawing on new research in neuroscience and narrative theory, Fletcher explores the nature of imagination, innovation, and creativity. He provides concise answers to big questions: How does storythinking work? Why did it evolve? How can it misfire? What problems can it solve? Revealing the significance of storythinking from science to business to philosophy, this book also provides ways for readers to harness its power to script better tomorrows. (shrink)