Taking Up Space: Embodying Formations of Visionary Fiction

As I have noted in the past, I study with an organization that provides yoga training in the context of disability, and every year, they hold a month-long "Kiss My Asana" yogathon, which I take as an opportunity to explore embodied experience more deeply, particularly how every body can access the most experience. Following the lead of Matt Sanford, who runs MindBody Solutions, I'm organizing my yogathon practice around creating context where it is possible to try to take up as much space as possible -- a feeling I think can be easiest to access through poses that encourage you to push out like a star. 

Last weekend's amazing Formation video repeatedly featured this star-spaced theme -- combining the physical act of making space with attention to the social relationships that challenge or support this space making, something I'd like to stay a few more things about, given that moving the yogathon to February from its prior location in April has placed it squarely in Black History Month.

This child takes this space in front of a line of riot police, which gives a sense of how this act of reaching out can take different kinds of effort, since the star-reaching, dry-swimming, afro-maintaining dance formation in the pool is obviously not easy.

Beyoncé is obviously very powerful -- and part of what has made Formation rock the internet is not just the power of star poses, but their particular use: pitting that power in both powerful and vulnerable ways against oppression:

Splayed out on a police car as it submerges in a New Orleans flood, after asking "Stop shooting us," or restaging plantation representations, she enacts what Adrienne Maree Brown describes as important visionary fiction, showing possibility and what the space it inhabits looks like:

Two Sharp Shakes

On Indigenous Peoples Day, being back on laundry feels mundane—but I am going to celebrate efforts to decolonize places by understanding the stories we use to shape those places, in the hopes that such efforts can help us shape them more equitably. 

Partly because of health problems, and arguably also because of class positioning and the effects that has on people's tolerance for disgust and their enthusiasm for demonstrating cleanliness, my mother taught me how to do laundry when I was quite young. And after twenty years living with my mate, one of the things I still often find myself trying to demonstrate persuasively is two sharp shakes of each laundered item as it goes from the basket onto the line or into the dryer. 

I have never liked ironing. (See also: learning to do laundry before being very good at controlling steaming metal appliances, or small ladder required to reach into washing machine, requiring climbing up and then down to the dryer for each piece of clothes...) Given my rather strong aversion, I've always thought of the two sharp shakes mainly as a way to prevent wrinkles. As I've tried to justify it in my demonstrations—and as I've learned more about the dynamics of laundering—I've realized it's not just about wrinkles (although the pre-emptive smoothing of the collar and placket and pockets does save me a lot of ironing). It also shakes off lint from the wash, pollen from the yard, and the various bits of leaf and insects that may be resting on the clothes. 

The pollen pieces (along with molds) aren't something I'd ever thought of before quite recently—and hence the justification felt quite ad hoc, even if it was legitimate. It made me notice, however, that I was adopting reasons that contributed to my feeling of doing laundry right. Noticing the distance between my ability to explain why and this definitive sense that two sharp shakes seemed to both serve some functions and also set the appropriate pacing for laundry hanging made me also notice than when I was too rushed to take the time for each garments' shakes (it turns out I shake them both before hanging and after), the need to shake them out lingers with the clothing, and I'll find myself wondering if it's legit to shake them in the bedroom, or if I need to shake any potential loitering spiders out on the porch, or out the window.

This is clearly a trivial case. However, it strikes me as a good example of the functions that lurk in practices, waiting to be explored. Exploration may provide insights into what makes these practices meaningful—not necessarily why they are persuasive or optimal, but perhaps why they have been made to feel right, perhaps through only dimly remembered instructions or modeled behaviors (it would not have been till years after my formative laundry learning that I regularly hung laundry outside with my mother and grandmother). And it reminds us that the way that we shape spaces to provide these instructions, often outside of explicit language, seems worth regularly exploring and reinvesting in.

A New Appreciation of What Pies Are For

I paid closer attention to the shape of my produce over the course of this last growing season. Partly because I’ve been working with a number of projects that are starting to figure out what it might be meaningful to measure in gardens, I’ve started thinking about how much food I collect, and what state it’s in. I had never really thought to account for how much of the food I produced was eaten by woodchucks or slugs – because I wasn’t eating it, I was just thinking of it not existing, effectively. But prompted by the wonderful Food Dignity project, I started to think differently about the produce that dried up on the stems because I hadn’t come to pick it (the dried beans and raspberries were delicious, and a handful would have been a pint fresh!), or the strawberries that would have been more edible if I had better air circulation, or the zucchinis I might have had if I could figure out how to distract the woodchuck.

None of this is to say that I feel like I must account for – and possess – all the production possible, but it also made me feel somewhat more successful, and to notice, furthermore, the different stages along the life cycle of a plant where it might be useful, something that had previously been tacit knowledge. For example, I live in a climate where fava beans don’t thrive, but they do well enough – and I can eat the greens if I don’t get enough beans. The purslane and sorrel that grow in my beds no matter what I do are likewise delicious, and reliable even when the rabbits eat whatever was more intentionally planted.

This attention to the stages and close relations of the produce I intended has also spilled over to the produce I find myself sorting as I prepare for winter. Sorting through a ten pound box of blueberries for freezing, for example, I found myself eating ones that might be too mushy to hold up well in my Individual Quick Freeze process – and also sorting out all the ones that seemed questionably ripe; it seemed like those might justify the high amounts of sugar called for in blueberry pie. And all of a sudden I gained a new appreciation of the function of pies!

Pies’ main function may be to deal with questionable fruit! This seems obvious enough in retrospect—although I’m not sure I’ve ever categorized pie as a holding tank for not-freezer-worthy fruit. And this categorization of such a basic staple has made me wonder what other functional food categories I’ve been overlooking at this time of needing to figure out how to squeeze more holding space out of my larder.

Hello, shrubs…

Critical pastoral: Reorienting in complex contexts

I spent the past several months looking across the Dunedin Harbour at what is marked on the bus maps simply as "fertilizer factory." The Ravensbourne superphosphate plant bills itself as the premier source for pastoral nutrients in New Zealand, and considering the role of fertilizer in pastoral systems has made me understand something new aboutthe way that explanatory stories operate, especially when they are about something like food -- something we encounter often, may care about deeply, but do not necessary have much systemic knowledge about.

The short version of how I've needed to revise my story of pasturing sheep has to do with understanding of how pastures work. Although I have known, at various points, that people fertilize grasses and other fodder to make them grow better (and hence that pasturage represents a potential threat to water -- frankly, even without fertilizer, potentially, given the nutrients in animal waste), I found that I still romanticized grassland systems as, at best, letting animals forage in ecosystems adapted to their grazing.

This is not exactly the wrong story, but it makes me think about the trajectory of my understanding of corn agriculture: for the first third of my life, as far as I can remember it, I thought of corn as an attractive indicator of successfully retained agriculture (even when I realized it was "cow corn," as we called it in my childhood, rather than fresh corn for human food). As I studied agroecosystems in more detail and came to recognize the food landscapes I encountered in the context of their complex relationships, cornfields became a daunting manifestation of monocultural extractive landscapes, designed for the most efficient transformation of metabolic processes into industrial returns on investment. It has taken over a decade of further exploring corn—growing beautiful varieties in my garden, curating and exchanging gift corn with interesting stories and geographical histories—to learn to appreciate some of the further complexity beneath the surface of what appears to be a repellently stripped down productivist ecology.

The fertilizer factory has helped provide a similar entry point into stories of pastures, making me wonder how others see their complexity. If farmers are compelled to maximize the returns on their pastures such that they become "locked in," as those who study the production of scientific knowledge call it, to the whole system surrounding the relationship between particular kinds of livestock and particular kinds of pasturage (white clover and sheep, for example, despite the better contexts for nitrogen-fixing microbiota that red clover might provide), how can we invite someone just appreciating the pastoral landscape into the whole fascinating world of the political economy of agroecosystems, to debt, the models of nutrients and water flows and soil edaphon, and the many stories that govern how we orient ourselves amidst these complexities?

Re-labeling a fierce wind: Listening more to internal dialogue

I commuted this morning for the first time to my new office against a head wind that was strong enough to beg for an additional adjective. The wind was whipping off the hills to the north and pouring into the valley with such strength that it stopped my bike on downhill slopes, and it took herculean pedaling to get to work in just under twice the amount of time I had estimated it would take. My route takes me around the bay end of Otago harbor, and especially as I got down to the south side of the water, the wind was not only trying to push me off my bicycle, it was also throwing fistfuls of water my way, and snapping branches down into my path. Passing through the lee of my favorite pohutukawa trees almost knocked me off my bike in the other direction, the contrast was so sharp when sheltered.

In this kind of retrospect, it is easier to deconstruct the various parts of my experience of the wind, and analyze their relationship to my emotional state in relation to it. At the time, however, my main reaction was terse. I kept finding myself exclaiming (to myself) about what a fierce wind this was, or how wicked.

This was clearly a practiced response—the kind of thing one might say to a companion facing into a stiff wind, perhaps to keep spirits up, or to check in to see whether a course correction might be in order, or if the goal is worth the punishment of the wind. It certainly summons a certain attention to the wind: is this the kind of wind that is bringing a change in the weather I need to pay attention to?

My immediate response was surprisingly normative: I found myself chastising my inner wind labeller. True, the wind is from the north northwest, and my northern hemisphere self braces against the Alberta Clipper-eque cold that often signals at the time of year. But here in Dunedin in summer, what if this is a warm equatorial burst? Pedal harder. And I would no sooner concentrate on pedaling again when I would hear the first voice start up again about what a fierce wind that was.

In the weeks that have followed since I wrote the first lines above on my first commute, this conversation with myself has stuck with me, and has made me notice some things about internal dialogue. First was its pre-formedness. I was not so much searching for descriptions for what I was experiencing as I was discovering what I was experiencing by the way my internal voice was narrating it to me. This was accentuated by the dramatic nature of the effortful windy bike ride, and my consequently narrowed mental bandwidth. When I wondered, somewhat involuntarily, “why is this so hard?” a preformed answer was already there with an explanation about the ferocity of the wind.

This was, secondly, not just a descriptive note, but a preformed normative analysis that constructed the wind as a character! By assigning qualities like fierce and wicked to the wind, my internal weather monitor was personifying what I was “up against,” and providing me a set of similarly preformed schemata for responding: fight, struggle, perhaps retreat. It was only through the second part of the internal dialogue that I could access a perhaps more interesting schema like explore—or even reconsider those hasty judgments that come from experience in a very different place.

Although fairly mundane, these observations about the qualities of internal dialogue made me start to pay considerably new attention to how much I was relying on presets to interpret and orient in new situations. And especially since I was already bringing the frame of reorienting myphenological expectations in a hemispherically reversed seasonal transition, I had yet a new tool for noticing when and how that second part of the conversation could be encouraged, figuring out what patterns I am observing, and how those work.

Every body's Embodied Experience

You cannot make or have experience for somebody else. You can, however, pay good attention to somebody else's experience, or interpret or discover the meaning of experience together, and in the process you might learn more about your own experience and what it means to be in a body. As narrators sharing words about the psychology of fiction and narrative in virtual space, it is easy to interact without paying adequate attention to embodied experience--and as such disembodied habit becomes reinforced, sharing the experience of ourselves in bodies can be challenging. As we interact with each others' narrative personae in this disembodied space, it also becomes easier to generalize from our own experiences--and to unintentionally discount others' experiences by assuming they should follow the patterns of our own. Because food is what I am often writing about, I get to cheat in some ways: writing about eating invokes bodily experience. But especially because food is the focus of my work, I sometimes want non-food methods for getting people to pay attention to their inward experience and to think and feel from inside their bodies. Toward this end, I have spent a significant part of the past year studying the teaching of yoga, and particularly teaching yoga in a way that makes it accessible to everyone. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the intensive workshop I have just completed has confirmed my suspicions about the radical potential of increasing access to embodied experience.

Yeast ethics and social space (Stretch beers for Valentine)

(Canada Day Eve)

After a month’s worth of conferences about food and land and society (a year of not traveling led to some overenthusiastic planning of meeting sessions), I am developing an appreciation for yeast.

Scholarly meetings give you many chances to think closely about mass-culture baked goods. Breakfasts, the one meal served at the CanadianAssociation for Food Studies meeting at Brock, had a lot of white bread, and bicycling around Sweden for the Relational Landscapes meeting (during a rail strike), I encountered many store-bakery versions of a cardamom bread I grew up making. And at the joint meetings of the Agriculture, Food, and Human ValuesSociety and the Association for the Study of Food and Society in Burlington, the Co-op had a fascinating spatial divide between extraordinarily artisanal breads and the plebian buns of the masses. (I allayed the anxieties of a bread-seeker agonizing over the ingredients of the hot dog buns I was looking for by pointing him toward the good bread section.)

All of these breads are enough to make one appreciate yeasts, and I made sure to feed my current resident starter as soon as I returned home. I am indebted to my Montreal colleague David Szanto for my current cultivation of this yeast community: it was the starter of his recently deceased dear friend Gigi, a starter for unpretentious and very flavorful bread. And it is promiscuously bubbling with my kitchen yeasts now, growing out in a warm metal bowl not long after midsummer, becoming part of the ecology of my home, and making me think about the disparity between the crucial function of yeasts and the prevalence with which we rely for functional metaphors on the extraordinarily available everyday functions that underpin bread and beer!

Wheat Rust as Boundary Object: Stories for Addressing Fear, Frustration, Defensiveness, and Disgust

Horror must be the emotion most associated with wheat rust. As this illustration from an Ohio State lab studying the fungus shows (in this case, as the spores propagate), there is an incendiary quality to wheat rust not only because it threatens a food staple so central to modernity, but also because it is red, and unfairly attacks the grain right before harvest, when it has already been accounted as a crop accomplished.

As a social scientist and as a person often tasked with translating between the moral fervors of wonderful groups doing excellent work to support and improve the food supply on which we all depend, I became aware of wheat rust as something that was used as a rhetorical tool to emphasize the urgency of the work of physical scientists--in a way that suggests that debate over the ethics of means of managerial science is inherently unethical for the time it wastes. This is an argument we also hear about hunger, as I have discussed extensively in the past. And while I sympathize about the need to act on troubling problems and not just talk about them, I also recognize that the way that we construct our narratives about issues like food science matter--particularly for the ways we experience the attendant emotions, which, around food, are particularly potent.

A remarkable illustration of the emotional baggage of wheat rust was brought to my attention on the recent occasion of the digitization of the records of the eminent Green Revolution scientists Norman Borlaug and Elvin Stakman at my institution--an event that exposed me to how much defensiveness and disgust were alive and well in the relationship between physical and social sciences around food provisioning (as I was berated by a colleague of Borlaug's for my colleagues' general lack of respect for his legacy, demonstrated in the continued insistence that analysis of distribution and power was as important as production, an argument increasingly taken seriously by agroecologists, among the most systemic scientists of the agri-food system). 

Described in the article The Barberry or Bread, an essay on the history of the barberry eradication program as a public effort to reduce the threat of rusts to wheat crops in the decades following this poster, this 1918 poster likens the skeletal red hand of wheat rust to red anarchists; it was also framed as a demon and an ally to the Kaiser. Even today, writing this essay, when I search for "red menace" and "wheat rust," I get over two thousand possibilities. 

In his essay Smokey Bear is a White Racist Pig, Jake Kosek makes an excellent case for how easily we naturalize the defense of something like forests via lovable symbols like Smokey, padding practical or nationalist arguments in sentimental emotion that may not seem exactly rational, but also hardly harmful. But pointing to the harshly racist propaganda campaigns that were used to tie support for more profitable timber harvesting industry efforts to war efforts, Kosek demonstrates how useful it can be to take the time to thoughtfully consider what baggage makes up the strands of our emotional reactions to things like forest-saving bears or wheat-ruining pathogens.

I know that the first time I found some weird spots on wheat I was growing in my garden (only a mile or so from the test plots where the Stakman-Borlaug Cereal Rust Center still carries out their work on wheat rust), I was horrified! Fearful that I might be ruining work I understand to be important, even if I would always like to help make space for discussion, I quickly clipped the blighty stalks out, stuffed them in a bag and trundled them away, then worried about the possible effects while I was off at a conference. (The wheat was fine when I returned, and all quarter cup of the threshed grains are still sitting in my kitchen while I figure out a proper fate for such carefully tended cereals.) I would like to think that they might act as some sort of talisman or truce flag indicating my interest in parlay with the rust warrior--a boundary object showing I respect their emotional constellations, but also asking whether we might transcend the frustrating rut of mistrust and mutual horror to explore what new stories help today's food needs.

In the Christmas Spirit: Tidings of comfort for all (or, what if the food chain didn’t pass value UP?)

As I gather with my family to make our yearly buche de noel, a cake shaped like a tree branch that we make during the darkest week of the year as a practice that involves much cheer, warmth, coziness, and reminder of our love of trees (when they leaf out again, when they are burned in our fires and built into our projects, and here, at the very northernmost edge of fullsize holly trees, in the glory of evergreens), I am reflecting on some of the most powerful themes of my year-long project of mapping the geographies of food stories. Influenced by the work of Mike Mikulak, it seems that this year’s most important narrative theme may be one of asserted abundance in the face of fears of scarcity – and this seems particularly salient as I struggle to retain a focus on the interesting parts of reciprocity in seasonal gift giving.

Most conversations about environment, food, and resources in which I’ve participated this year have struggled, at some point, with the question of what it means to have “enough for everyone.” People seem increasingly interested in how to talk about climate change, income inequity, and food justice in ways that give more people entry points – rather than in ways that trigger “loss frames”: concentrating on how to get people enough comfort to embark on a different conversation with composure and ease rather than feeling destabilized and disregulated by the fear of loss, or, worse, disgust at others who might seem less deserving of what we feel we have earned, by having it, especially in the defensive light of fear of loss.

Christmas and the other yule holidays seem designed as a stay against the fear of loss, especially in cold northerly latitudes where the turning of the darkest days may signal a return to light – but also a long cold season ahead, particularly hard to face from the darkness. Caroling to others, spreading baked goods around, cheery lights and fires, and even presents all seem designed to press gently back on the dark with its threat of cold and want, largely by the reassurance that there is plenty to go around, in comfort, for all (as well as that the green will return and the forests will be maintained as plentiful sources of provision).

As I think about the moral economy involved in this cake log – the reminder that everyone needs forests, that they are not just for the few at the expense of the many, that they must be cared for over time, even when we want them most now, and even over generations, even though that may not be conceivable – I realize that the traditions of the yule log involve wishes that the coming year might bring good fortune for all, including much happiness and food. And this underlines one of the most prominent emerging themes in my conversations about food: food sovereignty, which in this light might be interpreted as an assertion of the value of maintaining good fortune in circulation amongst all our relations – not allowing value to escape “up the food chain” – the danger I interpret people being concerned about in the loss framed narratives about the commercialization of Christmas. So may your  yule log burn merry and bright, and may it be easy for you to share comfort with all as we head over the hump of the darkest days in its warm light to the cold and uncertain days ahead!

Visual Methods for Exploring Challenging Narratives

I have had the chance over the past month to visit a number of collaborators who work with various interactive visual methods to get people to engage each others' stories. Visiting around also gives one a chance to check out the institutional arrangements people use to support their work -- and to think through some of the relationships between the methods people were using for interactive collaboration on specific knowledge-building processes and the methods they use to organize their work relationships more generally. 

I am tempted to dive into immense detail, describing such wonderful projects that are happening as part of the scholarship and practice represented at the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society, the Canadian Association of Food Studies (especially its collaborative project on working collaboratively!), the Syracuse Thinklab, the Works Progress Whole City project here at home, and the Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability at UBC (all of whose websites represent different and interesting efforts to represent varying stories about the ways things work with some coherence). However, since I will resume delving into my ever more epistemological maps of food system knowledge terrains with my remaining posts for this year, I reflect here on some key thoughts about the function of visual supports people are building for challenging conversation, opening the question to this community about how this work might relate to work on narrative and emotion.

I chose today's opening image (over a scrawling 37-part diagram of different contentious characters or roles in the food system that I'm drawing) because I have been so struck in a very intense few month of immersion in other people's collaborative knowledge-sharing projects at the role of comfort, narratives, and challenges, and this opening image -- from a wonderful post by Yasmin Nair on Immigration, Sexuality, and Affect in a Neoliberal World -- was one of the most to-the-point when I went searching for an image on those three themes. (I will say that I was tempted by this intro to a fantastic missive on Korean feminism, sexuality, and popular culture -- and that I should also acknowledge that outside these two cultural studies approaches, everything else that came up was about peace studies or illegible). It's true that what most of the collaborators I worked with were talking about was sustainability and food systems, not immigration per se (although immigration certainly figures heavily in considerations of the way our current food system works), the fact that it is considered revolutionary to talk about having a capitalism problem sums up perfectly one of the central issues I witness most of my peers facing. The main problems they work to address are considered too upsetting or challenging to discuss.

Consequently, I have been most impressed by the successes that some have had bringing emotion more directly into their narratives, to attempt to build comfort to support engaging challenges. For example, Thinklab co-directors Kathleen Brandt and Brian Lonsway carried with them a number of artifacts, often contrasting pictures on flashcards, noting the difference between conversations focused on "getting the food just right" and "not having enough to eat." Such an artifact at once pointed back to a specific set of narratives and dialogues between differing narratives, invoked a range of similar experiences of the potentially challenging confrontation involved in such dialogue, and suggested a truce both topical and emotional: a way to get past that sticking point in a conversation and to keep going with it. When I expressed my ebullience with the way that this achieved a persistent desire of mine to incorporate people's stories ABOUT stories into progressively more participatory versions of the story, people related a name: RESTORYING, which they thought everyone should know. Narrative inquiry colleagues, dear readers, forum theatre participants, how do you think about this challenge of building in enough comfort for people to be willing to engage in an exploratory story -- without losing the challenge that makes it worthwhile?

Setting the uncomforTABLE: Food to make a Dinner Party Difficult

It's hard to say how much you've been enjoying my first few months of this year of diagramming food movement dialogues -- but I knew I was doing something right when the new executive chef of my campus's dining services called on me last week to help design a series of Uncomfortable Dinner Parties. I had mentioned in a panel discussion some weeks ago that it seems critical that scholars and activists interested in food narratives help build capacity for engaging in difficult conversations -- and this idea stuck! It's not only complicating social theorists who enjoy the discomfort of a good challenging conversation, it turns out; the director of dining services realizes that practicing staying with a story through what might be an initially rocky start may be the only way, short of censorship and stability management, to get to a happy ending -- or at least a negotiated ending.

So looking forward to the possibility of having fun with uncomforTABLEs, I am starting to sketch out menus that I realize are all variations on a theme of homage to Mrs. Ramsey's dinner scene in To the Lighthouse (the scene with which, auspiciously, Marjorie DeVault starts her masterful work Feeding the Family). Setting the table, it turns out, provides yet another psychogeographical opportunity to think about how the setting of something like a meal might support or challenge its participants to portray themselves and to explore the characters of others. What if you are seated across from an uninvited guest? How far down the list of uncomfortable scenarios sketched out in my initial menu above do you have to read before you reach for advice on comportment from fictional (or other) dinners you have consumed through reading? Even as a food researcher, I often find myself steering dinner conversation away from a series of well-trod paths relating to angry and oversimplified commonplaces about farmers, seeds, and food choices -- but here is a chance to steer it back, hopefully around the cape of hostility, to the waters of even more fraught topics like toxicity, control over food system governance, and the historical traumas that underpin the modern food regime, like stolen land and forced labor. What kind of dinner tables are not adequately represented in food movement conversation? Whose voices do not usually get portrayed, and what about them either makes people bury their face in their soup or sit up and listen?

My fellow artists and STEM professionals in the Public Art St. Paul City Art Collaboratory, where we will pilot a series of food system suppers later this summer, have been crafting challenging and supportive courses to complement the tenor of different kinds of conversation (as well as roles of characters in different positions in the food system that we will ask participants in the suppers to play as the price of admission): comfort foods follow bitter greens with the promise of intriguing desserts and the temptation of challenging apertifs. All are invited.