Resilience and Self-Reliance in Canadian Food Charter Discourse

This article interrogates the rhetoric of “self-reliance” as a common feature of discourses about individual and community resilience by examining Canadian food charters in the context of regional food systems aimed at improving community food security. Despite the association of food charters with alternative food systems and progressive politics, we find that their ambiguous and shifting appeals to self-reliance largely conflict with their stated social justice goals of community food security, particularly the goal of alleviating the distress of food insecurity for vulnerable community members. Overall, we argue that the rhetoric of self-reliance in Canadian food charters primarily perpetuates a neoliberal ideology of resilience that promotes an active, enterprising ethos of responsibility for one’s own well-being, whether at the level of individuals, communities, or food systems. Our study thus contributes to critical scholarship that contextualizes and problematizes specific sites and practices of resilience discourse

Constituting community through food charters: A rhetorical-genre analysis

Communities across Canada are increasingly developing food charters, with at least 22 regional charters published in Ontario alone. As a rhetorical genre, food charters are persuasive actions that articulate not only the kind of food system to which a community aspires, but also the kind of community that it aspires to be. We argue that Ontario’s food charters play an important role in constituting a sense of community identity and values through the rhetorical action of the genre itself. We analyze how this is accomplished through two rhetorical features, the naming of community and the listing of community priorities, showing how these features simultaneously obscure and reveal ideological tensions and logical incongruities within each community’s vision for its food system. Our analysis illustrates how the genre of the food charter both responds to and shapes the diverse, possibly conflicting values that inform food policy and food security initiatives in Ontario, and it offers insight into how the genre itself may inadvertently constrain the action it is intended to perform

Informing health? Negotiating the logics of choice and care in everyday practices of 'healthy living'

This paper reports on a qualitative study examining everyday practices of healthy living (HL). Forty-four semi-structured interviews were undertaken with Canadian and UK citizens, aged 45 - 70, in April-May 2010. The research sits within the now substantial literature concerned with how health information is mediated, both by people and technologies, and employed in the context of 'good' health citizenship. Throughout this work, notions of 'choice' and 'empowerment' have been interrogated, theoretically and empirically, to reveal both the knowledge/power relationships integral to 'informing' processes and the shifting relationship between information and care in contemporary health encounters. In this paper, we analyse how people make sense of what it means to live healthily and how they know if they are doing so by focussing on three ways in which study participants become informed about healthy living: through their engagement with universal HL messages, through their own information searches, and through their attempts to measure their 'healthiness'. Following Mol's (2008) critique of the "logic of choice" in contemporary healthcare, we understand healthy living as a "situation of choice" where complex problems are framed as simple matters of choice and where information and technologies are understood as neutral aids to decision-making in support of 'correct' choices. Our analysis builds on and extends Mol's work by exploring how participants negotiate between this "logic of choice" and her alternative "logic of care" in their accounts of everyday HL informing practices and how the two logics "interfere" with one another. These accounts show resistance to the logic of choice through 'calls for care' but they also show clearly how the disciplining logic of choice works to (re)present such calls for care as failed attempts at healthy living, undermining the very practices the logic of choice seeks to encourage.Canada UK Healthy living Consumer health information Informed choice Empowerment Logic of choice Logic of care

Places and People: Rhetorical Constructions of “Community” in a Canadian Environmental Risk Assessment

<div><p>This paper addresses the issue of public engagement in environmental risk contexts through a rhetorical analysis of the key term “community” in a risk assessment of mining-caused soil contamination. Drawing on Burke's concept of terministic screens and method of cluster criticism, the analysis shows the divergent constitutions of “community” in the Sudbury Soils Study's official discourse and the citizen-activist rhetoric of the Community Committee on the Sudbury Soils Study. Tracing the verbal and visual clusters within each organization's articulation of “community” as place and people reveals how the official Study's technical-regulatory ideology of environmental risk and citizen participation is countered by the Community Committee's contestatory environmental justice ideology. These competing views of “community” are mutually constitutive in that the official Study's mainstream risk discourse establishes the terms for the Community Committee's reactive counter-discourse, thus limiting citizen participation mainly to questions of “downstream” impacts. Our rhetorical analysis of “community” suggests a generative method for understanding the complex power relations animating specific risk communication contexts as well as for potentially reinventing “community” in terms more conducive to meaningful citizen engagement.</p></div

Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol. 41 (1), 37–48 (2016)

The verification of factual accuracy is widely held as essential to journalists’ professional identity. Our rhetorical analysis of interviews with award-winning and semi-randomly selected newspaper reporters confirms this professional norm while revealing a preference for four types of image to describe verification methods. Spatial and temporal travel images paint verification as an embedded but adaptable heuristic process. Images of conflict suggest verification as a weapon and a shield against implied enemies. Journalists speak of vision both literally as the preeminent tool of verification, and figuratively as a metaphor for interpretation. Meanwhile, a fourth and seemingly predominant image—that of storytelling—functions to integrate the images of travel, battle, and observation and the different forms of professional identity that they connote. The quest for truth through storytelling likewise suggests a rich, if ambiguous, sense of good journalism as combining the instruments of fact with the craft of fiction.La vérification de l’exactitude des faits est généralement considérée comme un élément essentiel de l’identité professionnelle des journalistes. Notre analyse rhétorique d’entretiens, réalisés auprès de journalistes auteurs d’articles primés ou sélectionnés de manière semi-aléatoire, confirme cette norme professionnelle tout en révélant une préférence pour quatre types d’images textuelles pour décrire leurs méthodes de vérification. Les images liées au voyage, c’est-à-dire le déplacement dans le temps et l’espace, dépeignent la vérification comme un processus heuristique intégré mais adaptable. Celles rattachées au conflit suggèrent que la vérification puisse servir d’arme et de bouclier contre des ennemis implicites. Les journalistes évoquent la vision autant au sens propre, c’est-à-dire l’oeil comme outil prééminent de vérification, mais aussi au sens métaphorique sur le plan de l’interprétation. Une quatrième image, apparemment prédominante, celle du récit, sert à rassembler celles du voyage, du combat et de l’observation, ainsi que les différentes formes de l’identité professionnelle connotées par chacune d’entre elles. De même, la quête de vérité par le récit suggère de manière riche, quoique ambiguë, une idée du « bon » journalisme qui combine les instruments factuels et l’art de la fiction