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paper extends studies of ‘global work’ by considering the mobility of veterinary surgeons in the global countryside. The paper develops the concept of ‘disease ecology’: an assemblage of heterogenous actors and relations that inscribe and normalise mobility within professional subjectivities. Disruptions to these disease ecologies can contribute to new patterns of mobility. Drawing on biographical narrative interviews with 35 vets who have migrated to the United Kingdom to work, the paper shows how veterinary mobility is shaped by and emerges in response to these disease ecologies. Specifically, the paper describes how four narratives – ‘the first job’, ‘escape and adventure’, ‘the lucky break’ and ‘staying mobilities’ – contribute to veterinary migration to the UK, and how the lived experiences of work and inscriptions of mobile veterinary subjectivities within disease ecologies lead vets to stay in the UK. However, the paper also considers the role of Brexit in disrupting established disease ecologies and creating new patterns of veterinary mobilities. In identifying how Brexit challenges vets’ sense of place, the paper concludes by exploring Brexit's potential impact to the future of veterinary services in the UK.

This paper reports on research to track and trace the development and diffusion of a new initiative for clustering a diverse range of agri‐food businesses located in the rural state of Tasmania, Australia. The initiative is termed ‘FermenTasmania'. To structure our analysis, our research team leveraged the concepts of boundary objects and organisations, and the Triple Helix model of innovation; testing these sociological concepts and model as a means to explain the nature, structure and emerging trajectory of FermenTasmania. This paper aims to contribute two distinct, but related findings: first, analysis of the fit and utility of the aforementioned concepts and model to track the emergence of FermenTasmania; and, second, assessment of the dynamics of innovation regarding the formation of this new social entity bridging agriculture and tourism in a rural area, with particular attention to the role of place.

This paper investigates aspects of farmers' wellbeing in the context of their participation in an agri-environmental scheme (AES), the North Yorkshire Cornfield Flowers Project (CFP) in the North East of England. Recent developments in wellbeing studies have informed data collection and analysis. Ethnographic data was gathered via observation, field notes and semi-structured interviews with farmers and non-farmer volunteers. The paper discusses how farmers' social activity, identity, status and place belonging are enhanced through participation in CFP, and how this might promote their continued AES work. Recognising the potential for AES participation to enhance farmer's wellbeing may demonstrate added value of AES and strengthen the argument for AES funding once the UK leaves the European Union. There is currently little existing evidence in the literature to support this since with only a few exceptions, wellbeing has been characteristically neglected in rural studies research. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

The intensification of globalising flows associated with the current condition of globalisation has had a significant impact on the ways that people relate to, talk about, and construct place. In the context of non-urban places, impacts of globalisation are felt by young people who are uniquely ‘embedded' in local places. However, the ways that young people construct place under these conditions is opaque and complex. This paper addresses Farrugia's (2014) call for greater focus on the experiences of young rural people constructing place under the conditions of globalisation. A recent focus group study in regional Australian with 16-28 year-old people builds on the work of rural sociologists investigating this area. Place-making is demonstrated for analysis in this paper through young people's discursive narratives combined with verbal expressions of a more experiential and embodied place-making practice. This paper illustrates that young people's place-making ‘beyond the metropole' endures in robust and unique ways. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

This paper argues that ethics is a key driver of change in food chain performance. Critically, multiple stakeholder perspectives need to be understood as being legitimate when developing shared norms of what is understood by food supply chain (FSC) performance. To develop this perspective, the paper examines the discourses surrounding the performance of FSCs in 12 different national contexts. It develops a multi-criteria performance matrix (MCPM) composed of 24 attributes that reflect national FSC sustainability discourses. Specifically, it considers the potential role of reflexive governance in encouraging change to the frames by which actors and institutions judge the performance of FSCs. In assessing the links between ethics and reflexive governance, two types of ethical attribute are identified: ‘commonly identified’ attributes, which signify ethical dilemmas routinely discussed yet open to debate and subject to refinement and change; and ‘procedural’ attributes, which describe actions that encourage actors in the FSC to organise and structure themselves so as to more explicitly embody ethical considerations in their activities. The MCPM can be understood as a form of sustainability appraisal, but also as a cognitive tool with which to instigate further deliberation and action, helping to better manage transitions to sustainability within FSCs.

There is an emerging call for social scientists to pay greater attention to the social and cultural contexts of fishing and fishers. A resulting literature is evolving which focuses on individual life experiences, particularly relating to entering the fishing occupation, and what these might mean for the future sustainability of the fishing industry. However, the ways in which these lives are linked and intergenerationally connected remains somewhat of a blindspot. This paper considers the potential of a lifecourse approach to help us better understand how fishers accumulate, utilise and share capital(s) in getting onto and moving along the ‘fishing ladder'. Drawing on in-depth qualitative research with fishing families on the Llŷn peninsula small-scale fishery in north Wales (UK) the paper explores how there are multiple social contexts from which ‘prospective fishers' can begin their fishing career and which differentially (re)shape how they can accumulate capital over time. Later on in the lifecourse, fishers (re)negotiate their fishing identities in relation to the lives of others, within transitions such as parenthood as well as with older age. The paper's findings offer a much-needed temporal dimension to our understanding of fishing lives and what it means to be a ‘good fisher'. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

This paper addresses UK society’s relationship with meat and specifically explores the extent to which a process of ‘de-meatification’ is underway in this context and one of the mechanisms involved. It does so through analysis of reporting of the Meat Free Mondays (MFM) campaign in the national and regional British print news media. MFM offers a convenient yet powerful vehicle for trying to understand shifting meanings of meat not least because it directly challenges, and generates debate about the dominant – meat based – diet. The paper concludes by arguing that a shift is taking place in the status of meat within UK society with the print news media acting as a mechanism that is working in support of de-meatification. However, these conclusions are qualified in a number of important ways, including the anthropocentrism of the (de)meatification debate, its geographical variability and its weakly politicised character.

This paper explores the perspicacity of the ‘path-dependency' thesis for explaining pre- and post-retirement migration, extending existing debates in the literature on path-dependency retirement regions (Brown et al. 2011). The paper presents a case study of pre- and post-retirement migration to the Isle of Bute, Scotland. Drawing on findings from a household survey and biographical interviews with in-migrants to the island, we ground our understanding of path-dependency processes in individual behaviours and experiences, to demonstrate how specific attributes of particular places lay the foundations of path-dependent migration flows. Our findings support the path-dependency thesis, as applied to migration into rural areas, demonstrating how the Isle of Bute has followed a systematic trajectory from being a long-standing popular holiday destination with attractive natural amenities, to a popular retirement destination with a developed recreational infrastructure and, latterly, a popular pre-retirement destination in which personal networks influence migration decision making. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

This paper maps the ‘knowledge controversy’ surrounding the control of bovine tuberculosis (bTB) in England, which has become a highly politicized and controversial issue in recent years. The disease, which is now costing the UK over £90 million each year, has received substantial policy and media attention, particularly in relation to badgers and their role in its spread. This paper focuses on the ways in which the various debates associated with bTB and its control are presented in the press, with a specific emphasis on badger vaccination. The analysis compares regional, national and farming press, and identifies a number of complex dualisms against which the debate is framed. Three key dualisms are identified: (1) the scientific evidence on which policy support for badger vaccination is based (science versus practical reality); (2) the controversy surrounding the potential efficacy of proposed control measures (badger vaccination versus badger culling); (and (3) the role of different stakeholders in spreading/controlling the disease (victim versus culprit). These dualisms help to explain the unclear policy direction and constant divisions between those who do and do not support badger vaccination, and the continued status of bTB control as a public knowledge controversy.

This paper draws from data collected through interviews with the following groups: big data and/or precision farm equipment firm employees from numerous countries; commodity farmers in the U.S. who use big data; individuals from the U.S.-based Right to Repair movement; and farmers associated with Farm Hack from the U.S. and the U.K. With this as the empirical backdrop, the author interrogates the concept of “access” by way of the phenomena of justice, ontology, and claims making—emergent themes to come out of the qualitative data. This in turn allows the author to conceptually, analytically, and empirically unpack the concept into the following three categories: access, property, and sovereignty. A framework then emerges to talk about these socio-technical assemblages in terms of what they do and the political ontologies they engender, recognizing, for instance, that while access can afford individuals and groups benefits it can also detract from an individual's and/or group's ability to flourish. Being able to identify those practices of agro-digital governance that afford sovereignty can inform policies and programs by nurturing an understanding the worlds they make possible. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

The Dutch livestock farming sector faces complex challenges concerning its sustainability and social license to operate. Engaging with what is widely understood as a legitimacy crisis, the Dutch government organised a two-day multi-stakeholder meetings to explore future directions. Participants engaged with the public as a key but absent stakeholder, in ways that contributed to the outcome of the meetings in important ways. The paper charts and analyses how and with what consequences this happened. Findings are that participants discursively constructed citizens in terms of consumer roles, with deliberations turning citizen concerns about livestock farming into questions of consumer responsibility, sidelining citizens' political voices and discursively displacing the possibility of politics around livestock farming. This instance of network governance presents a case of depoliticisation of an issue of concern to citizens, closely related to market players being put in the driver's seat of change, with the government in a supporting role. The article argues that this raises significant questions on the nature and role of construction of publics in network governance. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Recently, democratic theorists have turned their attention to political representation. This renewed attention is inspired by a questioning of the formalist interpretation of representative government that presumes a strict division between elected political elites and deliberative participation in the public sphere. Several scholars argue that the standard account of representative democracy based on residence-based and electoral representation does not suffice to explain contemporary political practice. Representation , then, becomes a ‘practice’ in which the object of representation and the grounds on which it is defended, co-determine ‘who’ and ‘what’ is considered politically legitimate and how ‘interests’ are to be represented. In this paper we explore how discursive interaction on political representation takes place in an ‘institutional void’, i.e. a political setting in which there are no clear rules and norms to which politics is to be conducted. We base our analysis on an interpretative reconstruction of the rise and fall of a sustainability governance process in the Flemish agro-food domain called the New Food Frontier (NFF). We claim to have found several interacting political conceptions, that operated on both explicit and more tacit levels, which particularly shaped the political interventions within the institutional void of the NFF. Analysis reveals that the dominant/initial conception of the studied political process has strong affinities with Dryzek’s ideas on discursive representation. Competing claims on how political representation should work were linked to neo-corporatism and transition management. We analyze how these competing conceptions play in the organization, articulation and disintegration of the governance network. Secondly, we relate this deliberative ‘outcome’ to the broader political setting in which the sustainability governance trajectory was embedded. In this context , a re-negotiation of the rules of the game within a new governance setting and the relationship with institutionalized politics proved to be important factors in explaining the discontinuity of the process of discursive representation.

Although animal welfare is felt to be important by consumers, behavioural patterns do not fully reflect this. Rather than relating this attitude-behaviour gap to hypocrisy, this paper, building on pragmatic sociological theory and an empirical study, focuses on context-dependent moral evaluations. An analysis of focus-group interviews conducted in three countries shows that meat-related consumption practices involve several competing sets of moral conventions, and the results demonstrate that public concerns about animal welfare vary depending on whether they relate to an everyday or production context. In the former, animal welfare does not play a big role, and given this it can be argued that people are not hypocritical, since the practices and perceptions are actually united within the given context. It is concluded that the lack of civic justifications in the context of everyday life calls for new ways of making animal welfare relevant in this context in order to support consumers in moving towards products with high standards of animal welfare. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

This paper applies the transitions approach to a novel food production context, via an examination of the food production side of permaculture. More specifically, it examines attempts by the permaculture community in England to interact and influence the Agriculture Knowledge System of the mainstream agri-food regime. Strategic Niche Management and Communities of Practice theory are combined to examine the ways in which the permaculture community has evolved and has sought to develop its agro-ecology message and influence the agri-food regime. Evidence of second order learning and networking with stakeholders outside the community of practice is limited. A tension between internal activities that reinforce a boundary between the permaculture knowledge system and the wider Agriculture Knowledge System are evident. Some external activities designed to cross boundaries are noted. However, activities designed to translate permaculture ideas into mainstream agriculture have had limited success. There is some evidence of interaction and lateral linkage with sub-regimes to enhance capacity but this is usually in individual capacities. Examining the evolution of radical niche innovations such as permaculture thus reveals the way that beliefs, values and epistemologies make the process of sustainability transition challenging and complex, particularly when different knowledge systems clash with one another.

There is a wealth of literature exploring attitudes towards windfarms and the various debates surrounding them. However, for the most part, this literature has focused on responses to proposed sites, rather than exploring the long-term impacts of windfarms on local residents. This paper presents the findings from qualitative research in three English villages, which investigated how existing local windfarms are perceived and experienced by local residents, and how such new structures are incorporated into conceptualisations of rural place over time. The results show that, whilst concerns remain in some instances, the windfarms have (perhaps surprisingly) become a familiar and unremarkable – or even valued – part of the landscape for many people. Here, the varied interpretations of existing windfarms, and the place-based processes underlying them, are discussed with particular reference to rural identities and local contexts. The potential implications of the findings for managing future rural change are also considered.