Consumer Power to Change the Food System? A Critical Reading of Food Labels as Governance Spaces: The Case of Acai Berry Superfoods

This article argues that the marketing claims on food labels are a governance space worthy of critical examination. We use a case study of superfood açaí berry products to illustrate how marketing claims on food labels encapsulate dominant neoliberal constructions of global food systems. These marketing claims implicitly promise that by making careful choices consumers can resist and redress the ravages of unbridled global capitalism. Food labels suggest that consumers can use market signals to simultaneously govern our own selves and the market to ensure sustainable, fair, and healthy consumption. In response, this article develops, justifies and applies a socio-legal approach to researching food chain governance which uses the food label as its unit of analysis and traces from the micro level of what the everyday consumer is exposed to on a food label to the broader governance processes that the food label both symbolizes and effects. We demonstrate our approach through a “label and chain governance analysis” of açaí berry marketing claims to deconstruct both the regulatory governance of the chain behind the food choices available to the consumer evident from the label and the way in which labels seek to govern consumer choices. Our analysis unpacks the nutritionist, primitivist undertones to the health claims made on these products, the neo-colonial and racist dimensions in their claims regarding fair trade and rural socio-economic development, and, the use of green-washing claims about biodiversity conservation and ecological sustainability. Through our application of this approach to the case study of açaí berry product labels, we show how food labels can legitimize the market-based governance of globalized food chains and misleadingly suggest that capitalist production can be adequately restrained by self-regulation, market-based governance and reflexive consumer choices alone. We conclude by suggesting the need for both greater deconstruction of the governance assumptions behind food labels and to possibilities for collective, public interest oriented regulatory governance of both labelling and the food system

The Carer

The Carer is a short drama commissioned for the Shine a Light series of short films. Under the scheme, funded by Derby QUAD and the Esmee Fairbairn Arts Foundation, several filmmakers from around the UK were briefed to illuminate the experiences of people little seen on screen. In this case, writer-director Christine Parker took inspiration from Seen Ya Rights, a group of elderly LGBT activists to realize a story that addresses their current concerns and experiences. Director’s Statement The Carer explores what happens when an elderly man feels pressured to return to the closet in his dying days. I have taken visual points of reference from classic gay texts such as Jean Genet and Mapplethorpe in the film, (such as the use of flowers), which is about finding a way to survive and even thrive, when your very identity is under threat. In that sense, it mirrors the struggle we all have to find a way to come to terms with who we are and retain continuity of identity. The people of Seen Ya Rights lived through times when homosexuality was illegal, through the aids epidemic, and have spent a lifetime battling for the right to be out, to be themselves. They feared that in old age they would lose this hard-won identity. However, they also wanted a story that did not portray a Gay character as a victim. So, in The Carer, I set out to celebrate the survival and wisdom of our elders, and to pay tribute to their love and generosity. Students and staff of the University were involved in the project as well as industry practitioners, so it was a great way to integrate research into teaching.DerbyQuad, Esmee Fairburn Foundatio

Utopias, Magic Realism and Rebellious Spirits: Films of Christine Parker 1990 to 2000

Abstract: Utopias, Magic Realism and Rebellious Spirits: Films by Christine Parker 1990-2000. “The More You Look, the more THERE IS to see…” From Hinekaro Goes on a Picnic and Blows up Another Obelisk (Christine Parker, Oceania Parker, 1995) In the 1990s New Zealand was in the grip of free market fundamentalism, neo-liberal deregulation of the economy having begun in the mid-eighties. The Maori protest movement was a major source of societal conflict and feminism had become the ‘F’ word. This study examines my writing and directing during the 1990s in New Zealand. It is proposed that the films contributed to national and international conversations around feminism, colonial struggles, spirituality and the supernatural. It is argued that these works offer a social critique of neoliberalism and the divisive effects of it, on women in particular. In the context of this appraisal neoliberalism is understood to be a set of beliefs that support the functioning of the global free market, with minimal government regulation, except to protect the functioning of private enterprise and the ownership of private property. The short films One Man’s Meat (1991), Peach (1993), and Hinekaro Goes on a Picnic and Blows up Another Obelisk (1995) and the feature film Channelling Baby (1999) are located in an oeuvre of female, Gay, and Maori film makers and artists responding to this environment. The recurrence of alternative utopias, the use of magic realism and the representation of the spiritual and supernatural in my work are also considered in relation to other films made in the period. A case is made that the films were part of a small vanguard of films responding to the 1990s status quo by offering alternative modes of discourse to the dominant economic rationalism. Rich in visual intensity and heightened narrative tropes, such as irony and fragmented narratives, my aesthetic choices, together with recurring themes of chance and fate, agency and identity, are considered to link the films together as a coherent study. While the works are located in an evolving feminist tradition in the 1990s, their continued relevance today, particularly in relation to foregrounding marginal voices and the disruption of dominant paradigms and expectations of female behaviour and identity, underpin the claim for originality

THROUGH THESE GATES: BUFFALO\u27S FIRST AFRICAN AMERICAN ARCHITECT, JOHN EDMONSTON BRENT - 1889-1962

ABSTRACT THROUGH THESE GATES: Buffalo’s First African American Architect John Edmonston Brent The purpose of this research is to reintroduce the architectural and historic cultural contributions that John Edmonston Brent (1889-1962) made to the city of Buffalo, Western New York and beyond. A significant number of renderings, artifacts and photos from Mr. Brent’s forty-seven year architectural career were unearthed. This cache of rediscovered forgotten contributions made by John Brent would align him with other African American architectural pioneers during the mid-20th century. John Brent was educated by the first class of professionally educated and trained African American architects of the Progressive Era. Brent’s architectural career can be divided into three categories: draftsman, registered architect and landscape architect. Following a brief biographical sketch, the thesis focuses on the second half of Brent’s career from 1926 to a junior landscape architect for the Department of Parks and Buildings in the City of Buffalo until his retirement in 1959. The city’s storage vault revealed renderings of city squares, parks and neighborhood playgrounds from his twenty-four year tenure. As a result, Brent’s legacy was manifested in a five-month exhibition at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, as well as a min-documentary video – both created in partnerships between the author and professionals in the museum and media fields

The ethical infrastructure of legal practice in larger law firms: values, policy and behaviour

The article examines the impact of the cultures and organisational structures of large law firms on individual lawyers' ethics. The paper suggests that large law firms in Australia should consciously design and implement 'ethical infrastructures' to both counteract pressures for misbehaviour and positively promote ethical behaviour and discussion. The paper goes on to explain what implementing ethical infrastructures in law firms could and should mean by reference to what Australian law firms are already doing and US innovations in this area. Finally, the paper warns that the 'ethical infrastructure' of a firm should not be seen merely as the formal ethics policies explicitly enunciated by management. Formal and legalistic ethical infrastructures that fail to support or encourage the development of individual lawyers' awareness oftheir own ethical values and ethical judgment in practice will be useless