The Micropolitics of Community Supported Agriculture: Connection, Discourses, and Subjects

Abstract

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is a system whereby members purchase shares in a farm in the spring and then receive produce (maple syrup, meat, honey, vegetables, fruit, etc.) over the course of the growing season. The significance of this system is contested with critics, chiefly sociologist Julie Guthman (2008), asserting that CSA reproduces neoliberalism. Guthman's thesis on the relationship between practices, subjectivities, and political imaginaries is generative. My intervention is predominantly methodological. Guthman offers a systemic overview, in keeping with Michel Foucault's scholarship on governmentality, but does not explore the embodied nature of governmentality at the scale of the people involved. I contend that to understand how neoliberal governmentality plays out in CSA, we need to explore embodied practices at the scale of the people involved. I rely on Dorothy Smith's agent perspective and examine the practices associated with CSA for a discursive reading of those practices. My discursive reading employs J.K. Gibson-Graham's diverse economies approach. Participation in CSA cultivates a sense of connection to a local geographic community, and a community of practice, contrary to the seemingly individualized nature of the market transactions which form the basis of CSA. This sense of connection is supportive of prefigurative practices, farming practices, and activism. The relationality experienced by CSA farmers and members undergirds political activism, and the connection to communities of practice galvanizes and supports both discursive and protest practices. Attention to discourse at the scale of the individual provides insight into how discourses are co-produced and allows us to observe discourses in various stages of development, from those just entering the public square on social media, to those further developed, conceptually rich, with saliency for both farmers and members, and linked to political protest. The communities that exist in opposition to the individualization of neoliberalism, the production of discourse that both resists and reinscribes neoliberalism, and the practices that shape our subjects and political imaginaries, visible at this scale, provide insight into the connection between local and global discourses, and the connection between everyday practices and protest.