Browsing by Author "Byg, Reed Lauren"

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    Political ecologies of encounter: mapping enclosures and disruptions in food access
    Byg, Reed Lauren (Virginia Tech, 2024-05-03)
    This study is an examination of the role of community-based food projects in place making and collective futuring efforts. I look specifically at food access projects in Dayton, Ohio, a city I have personal connections to. In this study, I forefront the concepts of relationality, co-creation, ownership, economic (dis)investment, soil systems, and regeneration as they emerge from my fieldwork on food access in Dayton, which consisted of interviews, participant observation, and spatial analysis. My methodology centers on critical mapping which the traces conceptual and material connections that shape food access in Dayton and situate community-based efforts within broader economic and political landscapes. In doing so, I demonstrate how food access can be conceptualized in terms of global contours and local manifestations. I draw on the work of Anna Tsing, Karl Polanyi, Jason Moore and Bikrum Gill, to develop a political ecology of encounter that examines the historical roots and ongoing practices of enclosure as a tactic of governance that shapes human-nature relations in specific ways. I demonstrate how these acts of enclosure bring to the fore certain ecological relations in ways that uphold dominant systems of power, while obfuscating other ecological relations. This allows me to theorize encounters between individuals, communities, and environments as political sites of both impasse and change. I conclude that food (in)access is a feature of the production and management of eco-social relations by governments, communities, and individuals. Thus, in focusing on the eco-social relations and encounters that are fostered through food production, distribution, and consumption, communities can (and are) working to build more socially and ecologically just futures.
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    Sprawling Fields and Food Deserts: An ontological exploration of food and farming systems in Ohio
    Byg, Reed Lauren (Virginia Tech, 2020-07-07)
    Ohio is one of the largest agricultural producers in the United States and yet Ohioans experience food insecurity at a rate two percent higher than the national average. An analysis of Ohio's agricultural sector in relation to the current global food system suggests that the neoliberal imaginary orders social and ecological relations at both the international and domestic levels. This ordering perpetuates and justifies the continued exploitation of both labor and land and is based on ontological separation of human and ecological systems. This imaginary has given rise to the framework of food security, which has become the singular framework under which solutions to food and climate challenges are outlined by both local policy makers and major development and agricultural organizations. This effectively limits the possible solutions to only those solutions that fit within this imaginary. In considering the continued prevalence of food insecurity in both national and international contexts, it is necessary to explore other avenues for proposing solutions to the current food challenges, which will only grow as the impacts of climate change worsen. Food sovereignty, more specifically urban food sovereignty, offers an alternative ontological framework that expands the realm of possible solutions to food insecurity as a feature of the food sovereignty movement's recognition of multiple ways of being.