Science under Siege? Being alongside the life sciences, giving science life

The aim in this paper is to explore conditions of possibility for giving life to science in the context of science being under siege from twin agendas of industrialization and managerialization. The focus of this exploration is my experiencing a shift from being brought in as an ally in the strategic conduct of others to then becoming engaged in the life sciences of ageing. In nuancing these different ways of ‘being alongside’ (Latimer 2013), I show how social and life scientist’s attachment and detachment to things can bring them into an intimate entanglement with each other’s world-making. Keeping in view possibilities for breaching the dividing practices by which each of us are emplaced, as either life scientist or social scientist, I focus on gatherings that give science life and so get beyond things as “as others want them”

Beyond ‘food apartheid’: Civil society and the politicization of hunger in New Haven, Connecticut

This article illuminates the extent of community-based activism around food justice in New Haven, CT. Data was gathered through 28 in-depth interviews with civil society actors and participant observation across the food policy and urban agriculture (UA) sectors in the Fall of 2018. The paper traces the challenges that the sector faces in advancing a more democratic food agenda even when the municipality is relatively open to activist claims. Three key findings are identified. (a) Following in the American communitarian tradition, civil society groups working at grassroots level largely set the agenda for tackling food hunger in New Haven. That agenda, however, is broad-based and contradictory, incorporating initiatives aimed at addressing food insecurity and radical advocacy for food justice. (b) The efforts of civil society actors are structurally constrained by their dependence on philanthropic or grant based funding, on the one hand, and the symbolic rather than substantive support afforded by a fiscally weak, resource-poor municipality, on the other. (c) There is an inherent tension within the civil society sector arising from the disjuncture between strategies that have the effect of depoliticizing hunger and those that increasingly demand a repoliticization of hunger. These issues have been brought into sharper relief in light of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis and the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) mobilization, which, in concert, expose deep fissures in American society