Digital Food Activism

Digital Food Activism is a new edited volume that investigates how digital media technologies are transforming food activism and consumers' engagements with food, eating, and food systems. Bringing together critical food studies, economic anthropology, digital sociology, and science and technology studies, Digital Food Activism offers innovative multi-disciplinary analyses of food activist practices on social media, mobile apps, and hybrid online and offline alternative spaces. With chapters that focus on diverse digital platforms, food-related issues, and geographic locales, this volume reveals how platforms, programmers, and consumers are becoming key mediators of the mandate of food corporations and official governing actors. Digital Food Activism thereby suggests that emerging forms of activism in the digital era hold the potential to reshape the ethics, aesthetics, and patterns of food consumption.

Tanja Schneider is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the Institute of Sociology (SfS-HSG), University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, and a Research Associate, Institute for Science, Innovation and Society and Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford, UK. Karin Eli is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford, UK. Catherine Dolan is a Reader in Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, SOAS, University of London, UK. Stanley Ulijaszek is Professor of Human Ecology and Director of the Unit for Biocultural Variation and Obesity, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford, UK.

- Introduction - Digital food activism: Food transparency one byte/bite at a time? - Hacking the food system: Technologies of justice and inequality - Diabetes on Twitter: Influence, activism, and what we can learn from all the food jokes - Digital connections: Coffee, agency and unequal platforms - Political consumers as digital food activists? The role of food in the digitalisation of political consumption - Marketing critical consumption: Cultivating conscious consumers or nurturing an alternative food network on Facebook? - Displacement, 'failure' and friction: Tactical interventions in the communication ecologies of anti-capitalist food activism - 'Both Fascinating and Disturbing': Consumer responses to 3D food printing and implications for food activism - Hashtag activism and the right to food in Australia - Food politics in a digital era - Digital food activism: Values, expertise and modes of action Preface 1. Introduction: Digital Food Activism 2. Hacking the food system: Technologies of Justice and Inequality 3. The 'who' and 'what' of diabetes on Twitter 4. Digital connections: coffee, agency and unequal platforms 5. Women food activists and digital political consumerism: creating new forms of political participation 6. Marketing conscious consumption: selling an ethical alternative on social media 7. Displacement, 'failure' and friction: tactical interventions in the communication ecologies of anti-capitalist food activism 8.'Both fascinating and disturbing' - public responses to the idea of 3D printed food and implications for food activism 9. Hashtag activism and the right to food in Australia 10. Digital food activism - power, knowledge and consumer action 11. TBC 12. Afterward