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Critical food scholars have long noted that much of local food discourse in the US is underwritten by a deeply regressive agrarian imaginary that valorizes “small family farms” while erasing historical legacies of racism. In this paper, I examine one influential expression of the agrarian imaginary that I call the fantasy of “real food,” and illustrate how that discourse contributes to ongoing exclusions in farmers markets. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, I explain how the fantasy of real food positions white middle-class consumers to view themselves as protagonists in a romantic narrative of loss and recovery, in which their enlightened consumption practices precipitate the return of authentic social relations and connections to nature. I then trace the influence of this fantasy through a reading of selected popular media, and illustrate how the racist, classist, and patriarchal antipathies of the agrarian imaginary find legitimate expression in an alternate form as affectively charged moral and aesthetic commitments. Finally, I show how this fantasy logic makes both the exclusion of outsiders and the policing of farmers appear not only reasonable but morally righteous. I conclude by arguing that we cannot rely on the reflexivity of the privileged to deliver justice, no matter how well-meaning they may be, and suggest that we need new imaginaries and new narratives to guide our politics of consumption.

As part of the wider discourse of “real food,” consumers today are exhorted to “know where their food comes from” and “know their farmers.” This paper presents a critical analysis of real food disc...

In this article we attempt to envision what utopian higher education could be given the realities that currently shape students’ experiences. Postsecondary education is fraught with admissions that favor those with social, cultural, and economic capital; with course enrollment, class size, and instructor accessibility governed by bureaucratic labyrinths and austerity measures; and with major and career selection constrained by looming student debt. As higher education perpetually reproduces social stratification and increasingly mimics corporate practices, it is imperative to ask who and what higher education is for. Why do we continue to engage in it? Are there ways to salvage it from within, or does it require demolishing, clearing the rubble, and building from scratch? Can a utopian version of higher education exist at all if wider social relations endure? Using speculative fiction, this piece grapples with re-envisioning higher education as students’ daily lives, and the world at large, remain within the confines of capitalist realism.

Although failure and misappropriation have been central to Judith Butler’s theorizing of performativity, such concerns have been largely absent in the performativity studies of markets inspired by Michel Callon. Indeed, Callon’s performativity has been criticized for ‘presuming efficacity’ and overemphasizing ‘stabilizing processes’. In this paper, I propose a distinction between ‘science studies’ performativity (which privileges economic theory) and ‘performative agency’ (which attends to the constitution of economic agency). Previous attempts to discuss Callon and Butler together have tended to oppose her performativity to the former approach, but I suggest that the latter allows for a more productive engagement. I illustrate how this alternative offers a way to address persistent critiques of market performativity by incorporating Butler’s understanding of performative failure. The usefulness of this argument is demonstrated through a case study of the recent transformation of the street food m...

In recent years, a growing number of researchers in science and technology studies have begun to examine the relationship between science and politics. Specifically, they focus on citizen participation in highly technical policy problems and explore the possibility of a technical democracy that avoids pitfalls of technocracy. This focus, however, downplays a possibly more serious obstacle to technical democracy than technocracy, namely, realpolitik. Based on ethnographic and textual data on citizen–government interactions in the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster, we first show how citizens mobilised radiation detectors and counter-experts to force the Japanese government to admit scientific uncertainty about the permissible dose limit. We then explain why this successful mobilisation nonetheless had only a small impact on evacuation and compensation policies in terms of the pre-disaster structure of Japanese politics: the dominance of commission-based policy-making allowed the bureaucratic government to play realpolitik in the face of scientific uncertainty to expediently pursue its own interest, circumventing both democratic deliberation and technical rigour.