Review of \u3cem\u3eSuicide: Foucault, History and Truth. Ian Marsh.\u3c/em\u3e Reviewed by Oona Morrow.

Book review of Ian Marsh, Suicide: Foucault, History and Truth. Cambridge University Press, 2010. $35.00, paperback

Sharing food and risk in Berlin's urban food commons

Public fridges are open-access community-stewarded spaces where food can be freely and anonymously shared. As such, they are fertile ground for understanding the obstacles and opportunities for governing food as a commons. This paper examines the governance strategies that have developed within and around Foodsharing.de, a grassroots food-rescue network in Berlin, to manage food as a commons. Analyzing the commoning of food in Foodsharing.de provides a novel entry point into the multi-scalar and multi-stakeholder governance processes that shape our broader food system. In this paper, I further develop the concept of urban food commons to specifically analyze the governance of food and risk. In particular, I draw on qualitative research to analyze a conflict between Foodsharing.de and the Berlin Food Safety Authority over the potential health and safety risks of public fridges. Building on this, I show how different governance practices, informed by different risk ontologies and understandings of the common good/hazard of food, come into tension through the everyday practices of sharing food. This paper departs from previous research that has focused on how the benefits of food commons are shared and regulated at various scales, to also explore how their risks are managed, or could be managed, within an urban food commons framework.</p

Gleaning: transactions at the nexus of food, commons and waste

Gleaning, the practice of harvesting surplus crops at their source, has taken place for hundreds of years. The persistence of gleaning, alongside market-based forms of food provisioning, is an opportunity to examine how the food surplus of capitalist and feudal food economies can be appropriated for other uses, and support diverse economic practices. Presently, gleaning happens in informal and organized ways, and has long been a part of food security efforts in Europe and North America. Attention to the global scandal of food waste has generated increased support for gleaning efforts. This chapter examines the history of gleaning, the laws that support gleaning, and the post-capitalist ‘afterlives’ of gleaned food in a contemporary food sharing enterprise. Reflecting on these histories, the chapter makes a case for re-embedding gleaning practices in the commons

Ball jars, bacteria, and labor : CO-producing nature through cooperative enterprise

The production of nature has been employed to theorize shifts in nature-society relations that have accompanied historical transformations in production and social reproduction. While Marxist scholars have employed this framework to theorize the nature-society relations that accompany capitalist production, they have paid less attention to those that accompany non-capitalist production. In the meantime critical food studies has grown abundant with more-than-human and more-than-capitalist encounters with nature. This paper attempts to bring these two streams of thought together, in order to explore what they reveal about encounters and entanglements with microbes and non-human labor in the non-capitalist production of yogurt. Drawing on ethnographic research with a yogurt making cooperative in Somerville, Massachusetts, USA, I explore the contribution of microbial labor to the co-production of nature and post-human ethics in a cooperative food enterprise

Community Self-Organizing and the Urban Food Commons in Berlin and New York

Food sharing and food commons have both been raised as possible solutions to unsustainable and unjust urban food systems. This paper draws upon ethnographic research conducted in Berlin and New York to examine self-organizing in community food initiatives that are to varying degrees creating urban food commons by opening up urban space and its fruits to community use, sharing, and governance. In New York, the organization 596 Acres has developed an interactive map of vacant land to help community members self-organize to gain access to, steward, and protect the &ldquo;lots in their life&rdquo; for urban growing. In Berlin, the organization foodsharing.de has developed an interactive web platform to decentralize and democratize the logistics of food rescue and redistribution through peer-to-peer gifting and community fridges. The paper examines the possibilities and limitations of socio-technical innovations as &ldquo;tools for commoning,&rdquo; for self-organizing imagination, access, care, and governance in urban food commons. The paper contributes to debates on the role of socio-technical innovation in urban food sharing and practices of self-organizing in urban food commons

Community Self-Organizing and the Urban Food Commons in Berlin and New York

Food sharing and food commons have both been raised as possible solutions to unsustainable and unjust urban food systems. This paper draws upon ethnographic research conducted in Berlin and New York to examine self-organizing in community food initiatives that are to varying degrees creating urban food commons by opening up urban space and its fruits to community use, sharing, and governance. In New York, the organization 596 Acres has developed an interactive map of vacant land to help community members self-organize to gain access to, steward, and protect the “lots in their life” for urban growing. In Berlin, the organization foodsharing.de has developed an interactive web platform to decentralize and democratize the logistics of food rescue and redistribution through peer-to-peer gifting and community fridges. The paper examines the possibilities and limitations of socio-technical innovations as “tools for commoning,” for self-organizing imagination, access, care, and governance in urban food commons. The paper contributes to debates on the role of socio-technical innovation in urban food sharing and practices of self-organizing in urban food commons

Care, commoning and collectivity: from grand domestic revolution to urban transformation

Given profound urban challenges amplified by COVID-19, we need to center anti-racist feminists’ lenses oncare, commoning, and collectivity in our cultivations and analyses of urban change. We join a chorus of feminists that critique the devaluation, erasure, and isolation of care in the cities that we build and the stories we tell about them. But this is well-traversed territory, the ‘me too’ tale of every feminist who dreamsa different city or kind of urban theory. So, we outline a research agenda rooted in intersectional feminist imaginations and transformations that live around us. Neither nomadic nor confined to the home, care, commoning and collectivity can be aspirational, spatial, and practical. Inspired by Dolores Hayden and intersectional feminists, we ask: What kinds of socio-spatial imaginations can produce just, sustainable cities and who makes them? What material practices enable social change and improve everyday life, and at what scales might struggles for just cities be waged?</p

Unbundling property in Boston’s urban food commons

Households and community organizations are involved in the creation, use, care, and management of urban spaces, including through food practices such as planting, foraging, harvesting, weeding and pruning at the ambiguous edges of public and private property. Drawing on case studies in Boston, Massachusetts, we examine how commons are articulated through these practices, particularly in relation to multiple dimensions of property rights. Specifically, we ask how food practices can open urban spaces to negotiations around access, responsibility, care, and ownership, especially when (property) ownership is not an end-goal, but a circumstance shaping other practices. Using interviews and participant observation of individuals and organizations involved in urban food provisioning, we explore how households and community organizations are interrupting fixed notions of property ownership, by practicing urban commons. These practices and negotiations demonstrate ongoing shifts in the meanings of urban space with flexible understandings of property and ownership