Proceedings - U.S.A Agroecology Summit 2023

This docket is a memory of the meeting held in Kansas City from May 22-25 called the 2023 USA Agroecology Summit and contains all the documents generated before, during, and after the meeting

Theoretical perspectives on organizations and organizing in a post-growth era

The fundamental assumption we base this Special Issue on is that narrow concepts of growth have become the ruling ideas of this age, entrenched both in everyday life and to a considerable extent in the theoretical thinking and traditions of research conducted by organization and management studies scholars. We explain how tacit (or overt) endorsement of unbridled economic growth (the growth imperative) has pernicious practical effects and how it tends to restrict the intellectual base of the field. We argue that notions of degrowth present scholars with challenges as well as opportunities to reframe core assumptions and develop new directions in theory and research. Envisioning a post-COVID 19 world where societies and organizations can flourish without growth is one of the most difficult tasks facing theorists. We approach this challenge first by discussing the hegemonic properties of growth ideology and second by sketching an alternative political economy as a context for reimagining social and economic relations within planetary capacities in a post-growth era. Drawing on degrowth literature in ecological economics, sociology and political ecology, we identify key principles relevant to processes of organizing for a more just and environmentally sustainable future: frugal abundance, conviviality, care, and open relocalization. We conclude by introducing the three articles we feature in this issue along with some thoughts about theorizing policy and regulatory changes needed to generate transformational change and a future research agenda

Young stars and brown dwarfs surrounding Alnilam (eps Ori) and Mintaka (del Ori)

Aims: We look for new regions for the search of substellar objects. Methods: Two circular areas, 45 arcmin-radius each, centred on the young massive star systems Alnilam and Mintaka in the Orion Belt, have been explored. The regions are very young (less than 10 Ma), have low extinction, and are neighbours to sigma Orionis (~3 Ma), a young open cluster very rich in brown dwarfs and planetary-mass objects. We have used Virtual Observatory tools, the astro-photometric Tycho-2, DENIS and 2MASS catalogues, 10 control fields at similar galactic latitudes, and X-ray, mid-infrared and spectroscopic data from the literature. Results: We have compiled exhaustive lists of known young stars and new candidate members in the Ori OB1b association, and of fore- and background sources. A total of 136 stars display features of extreme youth, like early spectral types, lithium in absorption, or mid-infrared flux excess. Other two young brown dwarf and 289 star candidates have been identified from an optical/near-infrared colour-magnitude diagram. We list additional 74 known objects that might belong to the association. This catalogue can serve as an input for characterisation of the stellar and high-mass substellar populations in the Orion Belt. Finally, we have investigated the surface densities and radial distributions of young objects surrounding Alnilam and Mintaka, and compared them with those in the sigma Orionis cluster. We report a new open cluster centred on Mintaka. Conclusions: Both regions can be analogs to the sigma Orionis cluster, but more massive, more extended, slightly older, and less radially concentrated.Comment: Accepted for publication in A&A. It will be published on line in Sect. 14 (Catalogs and data). Tables in Appendix A will soon be available at the CD

Stacking Functions: Identifying Motivational Frames Guiding Urban Agriculture Organizations and Businesses in the United States and Canada

While a growing body of scholarship identifies urban agriculture\u27s broad suite of benefits and drivers, it remains unclear how motivations to engage in urban agriculture (UA) interrelate or how they differ across cities and types of organizations. In this paper, we draw on survey responses collected from more than 250 UA organizations and businesses from 84 cities across the United States and Canada. Synthesizing the results of our quantitative analysis of responses (including principal components analysis), qualitative analysis of textual data excerpted from open-ended responses, and a review of existing literature, we describe six motivational frames that appear to guide organizations and businesses in their UA practice: Entrepreneurial, Sustainable Development, Educational, Eco-Centric, DIY Secessionist, and Radical. Identifying how practitioners stack functions and frame their work is a first step in helping to differentiate the diverse and often contradictory efforts transforming urban food environments. We demonstrate that a wide range of objectives impact how urban agriculturalists practice UA and that political orientations and discourses differ across geographies, organizational type and size, and funding regime. These six paradigms provide a basic framework for understanding UA that can guide more in-depth studies of the gap between intentions and outcomes, while helping link historically and geographically specific insights to wider social and political economic processes