Browsing by Author "Eli, Karin"

Digitalisation is changing how food is produced, distributed and consumed (Carolan, 2017; Lupton, forthcoming; Schneider et al., 2018). In this presentation, we consider how STS can contribute to studying emerging food consumption practices that we describe as 'digital eating', i.e., eating practices enabled and maintained through mobile, sensor-based and digital technologies. Examples include tracking food consumption through mobile apps, adopting a new diet through following blogs and vlogs, connecting with communities of like-minded eaters through social media and video-sharing sites. An investigation of digital eating is particularly timely as digital sources increasingly mediate how consumers seek, share and interpret food-related information. In the digital media landscape, boundaries between experts and laypeople are blurred, with consumers becoming vocal and influential contributors of information about food. Through digital platforms, then, both programmers and users/consumers/citizens are key mediators of the advice and mandate of official governing actors, such as states and international regulating agencies. Thus, the interactions between digital platforms and users hold the potential to reshape patterns of food consumption on a population-wide scale, with public health and food policy implications. To study emerging practices of digital eating, we turn to STS and the related fields of digital anthropology, sociology and Internet studies, for a critical review of how food-related digital engagements have been theorised and analysed. Based on this review, we identify promising approaches and methodologies, and develop a new conceptual framework for examining which kinds of food engagements digital eating makes possible, and for whom.

This paper considers digital platforms used for food activism as infrastructures that give rise to ontological experiments (Jensen and Morita, 2015). We focus on an exploration of how realities are made, co-constituted or transformed in and through socio-technical assemblages and their interactions with people and things (Gad et al, 2015). Our analysis is based on three case studies exploring different types of digital platforms - a mobile app, a wiki platform and an online-centric activist organization - capturing diverse forms and potentials of what we refer to as 'digital food activism'. We compare the case studies through three core questions: (1) how are activism, expertise, and agency defined on each of the platforms? (2) how do the user actions facilitated on each platform enact activist values and identities? (3) how does platform infrastructure create new spatialities and materialities of political action? Our comparison reveals the multiplicity and experimental nature of digital food activism and draws attention to how food is ontologically respecified in the entanglements of activists, consumer-citizens and digital platforms. We discuss the implications of this ontological respecification for agency, democracy and economy (cf. Counihan and Siniscalchi, 2014). Our aim is to understand what digital food activism is 'doing', with a particular interest in exploring the potential for interventions in the sense of 'artful contamination' (Zuiderent-Jerak and Jensen, 2007). Ultimately, our paper builds on and contributes to 'the turn to ontology' in STS and more recent theorising that seeks to connect STS' research interests in infrastructures, experiments and ontology.

New information and communication technologies (ICTs) increasingly enable social action and civic organisation, on both local and global scales. Ranging from social media platforms to mobile apps, data sharing wiki platforms, and hacktivist projects, the activist landscape is rapidly shifting, collapsing geographic boundaries to invoke social and ethical values on a transnational scale, and form new issue publics with fast, sometimes mercurial, collective action. Within these emerging digital platforms for activism, food-related consumer action is gaining new contours and publics. In this paper, we explore the emerging field of digital food activism. Digital food activism does not simply refer to food activism that occurs on digital media. Rather, it encompasses forms of food activism enabled and shaped by and through digital media platforms, with the medium as an integral part of the activist project. Focusing on three case studies - a mobile app, a wiki platform, and an online-centric activist organisation - we examine how activist-ICT interactions generate new knowledges and practices in relation to consumer-based food activism. With particular emphasis on the social and ethical values implicated in ICT-enabled food activism, we critically analyse how European consumers and social entrepreneurs use ICTs to facilitate new forms of engagement with food, and how ICTs, in turn, shape possibilities for action. Bridging anthropology and science and technology studies, our analysis develops new understandings of alternative food networks, social movements, political consumerism, and expertise in the digital age.

New information and communication technologies (ICTs) increasingly enable social action and civic organisation, on both local and global scales. Ranging from social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, to mobile apps such as Buycott, and to data sharing wiki platforms and hacktivist projects, the activist landscape is rapidly shifting, collapsing geographic boundaries to form new issue publics and fast, sometimes mercurial, collective action. Within these emerging digital platforms for activism, food-related consumer action is gaining new contours and publics. Focusing on three case studies – a mobile app, a wiki platform, and an online-centric activist organization – we will examine how activist-ICT interactions generate new knowledges and practices in relation to consumer-based food activism. Specifically, we will critically analyse how consumer activists and social entrepreneurs use ICTs to facilitate new or alternative forms of engagement with food, and how ICTs, in turn, shape possibilities for action. Bridging anthropology and science and technology studies, the chapter will develop new understandings of alternative food networks, social movements, activist leadership, and expertise in the digital age.

Digital technologies increasingly mediate how producers and consumers seek, share and interpret food and food-related information and eating practices. This has led to a burgeoning research interest in the digitalisation and datafication of food and eating and the implications of these processes (Lewis and Phillipov, 2018; Lupton, 2018; Schneider et al., 2018). In this chapter, we offer a review of recent studies, including our own past and on-going research, which have examined food and eating in the digital sphere. Building on this review, we delineate a research agenda, informed by social anthropology and science and technology studies (STS), that draws on ethnographic sensibilities to explore ‘the digital’ in digital food studies. Such an ethnographic approach, we argue, can problematise reductionist understandings of ‘the digital’, capture the porous boundaries between ‘digital’ and ‘analogue’ food and eating, and reveal the complex ‘symbiotic agency’ (Neff and Nagy, 2018) of people, food and platforms.

This paper considers food as a site of public engagement with science and technology. Specifically, we focus on how public engagement with food is envisioned and operationalised by one non-profit organisation, foodwatch. Founded in Germany in 2002, foodwatch extensively uses new information and communication technologies to inform consumers about problematic food industry practices. In this paper, we present our analysis of 50 foodwatch e-newsletters published over a period of one year (2013). We define foodwatch’s approach as ‘governance by campaign’ – an approach marked by simultaneously constituting: (a) key food governance issues, (b) affective publics that address these topics of governance through ICT-enabled media and (c) independent food and food-related expertise. We conclude our paper with a discussion of foodwatch’s mode of ‘governance by campaign’ and the democratic limits and potentials of a governance mode that is based on invited participation.

This introductory chapter considers food activism within contemporary ‘digital food cultures’. Based on a review of the literature on food activism and digital activism, we introduce the concept of digital food activism, which we have developed to capture diverse forms of digitally mediated practices of food activism, their distinctiveness and their constitutive effects. We situate these practices within the larger multidisciplinary literature on digital devices, platforms and infrastructures, focusing on the affordances of digital platforms; here, our aim is to explore the kinds of interactions these platforms enable and constrain, and what this means for digital food activism. Building on our own research on digital food activism, which focuses on three case studies – a mobile app, a wiki platform, and an online-centric activist organization - we consider digital platforms used for food activism as ‘infrastructures that give rise to ontological experiments’ (Jensen and Morita, 2015) and call attention to how food is ontologically respecified in the entanglements of diverse types of activists and digital platforms. We illustrate this ontological respecification through an analysis of an auto-ethnographic episode that describes the encounter and entanglement between a researcher-consumer, barcode scanner app, supermarket, water bottle, multi-national corporation, Swiss mountain valley, crowd-sourced database, food-centred campaign and blog post. To conclude, we discuss the implications of this ontological respecification for agency, democracy and economy, and elucidate the similarities and differences between ‘traditional’ food activism (Counihan and Siniscalchi, 2014) and digital food activism.

In this article, we explore the discursive constructions of Buycott, a free mobile app that provides a platform for user-generated ethical consumption campaigns. Unlike other ethical consumption apps, Buycott’s mode of knowledge production positions the app itself as neutral, with app users generating activist campaigns and providing both data and judgment. Although Buycott is not a dedicated food activism app, food features centrally in its campaigns, and the app seems to provide a mobile means of extending, and perhaps expanding, alternative food network (AFN) action across geographies and constituencies. Thus, as a case study, Buycott unveils contemporary possibilities for citizen participation and the formation of activist consumer communities, both local and transnational, through mobile technologies. Our analysis shows, however, that despite the app’s user-generated format, the forms of activism it enables are constrained by the app’s binary construction of action as consumption or non-consumption and its ethos of ‘voting with your wallet’. Grounded in texts concerning Buycott’s two largest campaigns (Demand GMO Labeling and Long live Palestine boycott Israel), our analysis delineates how Buycott, its campaigns, and its modes of action take shape in user, media, and app developer discourses. We find that, as discursively framed, Buycott campaigns are commodity-centric, invoking an ‘ethics of care’ to be enacted by atomized consumers, in corporate spaces and through mainstream, barcode-bearing, retail products. In user discourses, this corporate spatiality translates into the imagined materializing of issues in products, investing commodities with the substance of an otherwise ethereal cause. This individualized, commodity-centric activism reinforces tenets of the neoliberal market, ultimately turning individual users into consumers not only of products, but also of the app itself. Thus, we suggest, the activist habitus constructed through Buycott is a neoliberal, consumer habitus.

This paper explores how consumers’ ethical food consumption practices, mediated by mobile phone applications (apps), are transformed into digital data. Based on a review of studies on the digitalization of ethical consumption practices and food apps, we find that previous research, while valuable, fails to acknowledge and critically examine the digital labor required to perform digitalized ethical food consumption. In this paper, we call for research on how digital labor underlies the digitalization of ethical food consumption and develop a conceptual framework that supports this research agenda. Our proposed conceptual framework builds on three interconnected analytical concepts—datafication, affordances and digital labor—that enable the study of digital labor as an infrastructural element of digitalized food consumption. We illustrate our conceptual framework through our previous research concerning Buycott, a US-based mobile app whose stated aim is to facilitate consumers’ ethical purchasing decisions. Using the walkthrough method, we consider how the Buycott app engages user-generated data and what implications this holds for consumers. The app’s infrastructure, we suggest, connects ethical consumption and digital labor. A richer understanding of the digital food economy, we propose, enables social scientists not only to elucidate how consumers engage in digital labor, but also to contribute to the development of new data governance structures in the digital food economy. We therefore call for social scientists interested in food, consumption and the digital economy to contribute to a new research agenda for studying everyday food digitalization by empirically examining how ethical consumption apps implicate ethical consumers’ work.