OER Hub for Teaching Introductory Level Sociology Courses

This project is a resources hub for instructors teaching introductory level sociology courses. It is based on SOC 1101 Elements of Sociology taught at City Tech. The website includes useful course materials such as a syllabus template, links to City Tech and CUNY policies, model courses, and useful links to OER sources, among other resources. In addition, it provides pedagogical tools such as examples of in-class activities, assessment rubrics, and online teaching support

Raw Milk, Raw Power: States of (Mis)Trust

In recent years, raw milk has emerged as one of the most contentious food commodities, considered a serious health risk by public health officials and a source of healing and nourishment by raw milk proponents. The purpose of this article is to explore the ways in which consumers construct and experience trust in food that is often procured in informal markets. Because the image of an overreaching, exploitative government features prominently in popular narratives surrounding raw milk consumption, this article is explicitly concerned with the role of the state in public food debates. Drawing on two complementary empirical cases of raw milk consumption in the United States and postsocialist Lithuania, I argue that there are two competing projects that underlie the struggles surrounding raw milk provisioning in both sites: the politics of recognition and the politics of sovereignty. As similarly argued by Charles Taylor, the politics of recognition emphasizes the efforts of raw milk consumers to be accepted, supported, and recognized by the larger polity, including its public health institutions, legislative bodies, and welfare state. On the other hand, raw milk proponents call for sovereignty, postulating that food choices and intake should lie outside of state prerogatives. More broadly, this study reveals how trust in a food product is tied to the ongoing legitimacy crisis of the modern state, and in particular how a renewed value of locavorism becomes anchored in a fundamental distrust of the postindustrial, postwelfare state and its institutions

How milk does the world good: Vernacular sustainability and alternative food systems in post-socialist Europe

Scholarly debates on sustainable consumption have generally overlooked alternative agro-food networks in the economies outside of Western Europe and North America. Building on practice-based theories, this article focuses on informal raw milk markets in post-socialist Lithuania to examine how such alternative systems emerge and operate in the changing political, social, and economic contexts. It makes two contributions to the scholarship on sustainable consumption. In considering semi-subsistence practices and poverty-driven consumption, this article argues for a richer, more critical, and inclusive theory of sustainability that takes into consideration vernacular forms of exchange and approaches poor consumers as subjects of global history. Second, it revisits practice theories and infrastructures of consumption approaches to consider ruptures, discontinuities, and historical change in infrastructures as a way to account for inequalities and experiences of marginalization

The Anti-Fracking Movement and the Politics of Rural Marginalization in Lithuania: Intersectionality in Environmental Justice

While the environmental justice perspective focuses on the unequal distribution of environmental risks and benefits across different groups based on race, class, or gender, intersectionality approaches avoid the use of a priori categories to examine marginalization. We argue that intersectionality can broaden the scope of environmental justice studies by examining interactive, historically grounded processes through which categories of difference are produced. To support this argument, we present an illustrative case of the movement in Lithuania that challenged Chevron’s plans to prospect shale resources for potential fracking. We conduct a narrative analysis of public discourses surrounding the formation of the movement and track the creation of a particular category of difference: the rural community, represented in opposition to the urban. We show how the public debate in Lithuania culminated in questioning the legitimacy of the anti-fracking movement and devaluing the rural population more broadly. We also show how both media accounts and anti-fracking movement leaders ignored social inequalities in rural villages. We conclude with a discussion of how the intersectionality approach provides an analytical lens to consider geopolitical tensions as part of the matrix of power relations that can be understood as expressions of ontological insecurity in global borderlands

Urban Farming in the North American Metropolis: Rethinking Work and Distance in Alternative Food Networks

This article examines the role of manual work in bridging the distance between production and consumption in alternative agro-food economies, particularly in urban farming. Scholars and public commentators often draw on Marxian theories of alienation to suggest that manual work constitutes a key strategy for reconnecting production and consumption, and overcoming the ecological rift between natural processes and modern, agro-industrial production. Focusing on urban farming, this article complicates the picture of unalienated, decommodified labor and points to continuous negotiations between experiences of re-embedding in the community and the environment, and the on-going commodification of the farming experience. We argue that urban farms function as sites of experiential production where farm managers stage work experiences for the volunteers and where visitors build new socialities, reconnect to nature, and accrue social and cultural capital in the context of a global economy that offers limited work opportunities for a generation of highly educated college graduates. Relying on ethnographic fieldwork and 40 semi-structured interviews with urban farmers and volunteers in metropolitan areas of the Northeastern United States as well as the examination of online and print materials, our analysis highlights the contradictory ways in which manual work in alternative agro-food networks indeed counters alienation, while also reproducing consumer society institutions and reinforcing the core values defining neoliberalism such as productivity and self-improvement

Self-Reliance beyond Neoliberalism: Rethinking Autonomy at the Edges of Empire

Across scholarly and popular accounts, self-reliance is often interpreted as either the embodiment of individual entrepreneurialism, as celebrated by neoliberal designs, or the basis for communitarian localism, increasingly imagined as central to environmental and social sustainability. In both cases, self-reliance is framed as an antidote to the failures of larger state institutions or market economies. This paper offers a different framework for understanding self-reliance by linking insights drawn from agrarian studies to current debates on alternative economies. Through an examination of the social worlds of semisubsistence producers in peripheral zones in the Global North, we show how everyday forms of self-reliance are mutually constituted with states and markets, particularly through interactions with labor institutions and hybrid property regimes linking individual and collective interests. We draw on empirical data from two ethnographic case studies connected by a shared colonial history and continuing local mythologies of frontier self-sufficiency: salmon fisheries in rural Alaska in the US, and agrofood economies in socialist and postsocialist Lithuania. In each site we find that although local expressions of self-reliance diverge in critical respects from neoliberal visions, these forms of everyday autonomy are nevertheless enlisted to promote market liberalization, ultimately threatening the very conditions that have long sustained semisubsistence producers\u27 self-reliance in the first place

Beyond Europeanization: The politics of scale and positionality in Lithuania’s alternative food networks

This article brings geographical insights to understanding the Europeanization of agri-food politics in new European Union member states. Most literature on agri-food policy and law in the European Union has conceptualized policy making and implementation as an institutional process involving multiple levels of governance. In this perspective, Europeanization is understood as a process through which stakeholders formulate, negotiate, and implement legal principles and procedures across various institutions at different levels of governance. By employing the conceptual tools developed in geographical research, we contribute a spatial and historical dimension to these studies. Our analysis shows how the politics of scale and sociospatial positionality can help explain idiosyncratic shifts in food policies in new European Union member states that could not be attributed solely to institutional processes. To develop these arguments, our empirical analysis focuses on shifting agri-food regulatory frameworks for Alternative Food Networks in Lithuania. In particular, we analyze how and why Lithuanian authorities began changing and simplifying food safety and veterinary requirements for the production, processing, and distribution of small quantities of food products sold directly to consumers through Alternative Food Networks in the local market. We show how Lithuania’s positionality in regional and global markets contributed to the growth of the direct sales sector. Our analysis also reveals the agency of local producers and consumers in creating conditions for policy change. This analysis suggests that Europeanization of food politics in the new European Union member states is best understood as a spatial reordering of the region and its historical relationships

Infrastructures of Taste: Rethinking Local Food Histories in Lithuania

Lithuania hosts a diversity of places that offer consumers a taste of local food, which appear to mirror the recent popularity of local and alternative food initiatives globally. In this paper we show that the proliferation of local foods in the region is not a novel phenomenon, nor is it solely a manifestation of taste preferences or identities associated with food. Drawing on the growing scholarly work on the role of infrastructures in mediating social, economic and political relations, we conceptualize the taste for local food as embedded in broader networks and reproduced through material facilities. To advance this argument, our empirical analysis shows how the infrastructure for local food has been fostered, transformed, threatened, but never eradicated during: the Soviet policies that supported subsidiary agriculture and market infrastructures; neoliberal market reforms in the 1990s that made public markets into mainstays for farmers and consumers; and EU accession that brought more stringent regulations and subsidies. Our research demonstrates that today’s taste for local foods in Lithuania is neither a local nor global phenomenon, but an outcome of historical processes that foregrounded the formation of smallholder agriculture, direct sales, and self-provisioning practices in the region. More broadly, our research shows how local food persists as an integral part of a broader agro-food infrastructure

The war in Ukraine and food security in Eastern Europe

This dispatch outlines some of the immediate consequences and long-term challenges posed by the Ukraine war on food security and production systems in Eastern Europe. We draw particular attention to the food aid and provisioning realities around many million (and increasing) numbers of Ukrainian refugees, and the current lack of systemic, government-coordinated responses to the humanitarian crisis. Further, we outline the distinct forms of agriculture characterising Eastern Europe, notably, the short supply chains and farming networks that are socially and environmentally unique and valuable, and are a result of the persistence of smaller, family-led farms. However, these farms and farmers are facing increasingly difficult times as a result of inflation, rising fuel prices, rationing, climate stress, export bans, and now large numbers of refugees arriving to some already very poor rural areas. We highlight the need for these multiple stresses to be discussed together, for their consequences on food production in the short- and long-term, especially as the effects of the war extend beyond the region. These stresses include, in the immediate, a lack (and a lack of reliability) of state aid and infrastructures for refugee hosts and food aid organizations and, in the longer-term, persisting EU-policy and market pushes towards intensification that will greatly challenge the smallholder system in Eastern Europe