Urban Farm DB
Research catalogue
Database research record2018·United States

Justice across Real and Imagined Food Worlds: Rural Corn Growers, Urban Agriculture Activists, and the Political Ontologies They Live By

Michael Carolan

Rural Sociology

Urban Farm DB summary

Understandings of "social justice" and "autonomy" were investigated among conventional corn producers in North Dakota and participants in an urban agriculture cooperative in an anonymized U.S. city. Qualitative interviews and "word cloud" analysis revealed greatly differing understandings of these concepts, but both groups were grounded in a shared neoliberal world that negatively impacts both populations. Interviewees in the rural space failed to understand their marginalization as an artifact of the neoliberal worldview.