Beyond Global Food Supply Chains: Crisis, Disruption, Regeneration

Abstract

Edited by Victoria Stead and Melinda Hinkson, the collection takes the upheaval of the pandemic as a springboard from which to interrogate a larger set of structural, environmental and political fault lines running through the global food system. In a context in which disruptions to the production, distribution and consumption of food are figured as exceptions to the smooth, just-in-time efficiencies of global supply chains, the essays examine the pandemic not simply as a particular and acute moment of disruption but rather as a lens on a deeper, longer set of structural processes within which disruption is endemic.

The thirteen chapters offer short, sharp interventions that track disruptive forces and political possibilities at key points along the global food supply chain – and, critically, beyond it. They traverse subjects ranging from agri-investment to corporate and alternative food production systems, labour relations, pandemic supermarkets, logistics systems, the politics of hunger, the limits of consumer ethics, and the possibilities of supply chain disruptions as moments of reprieve. They offer rich, generative reflections on the contemporary global food system, and would also be very well suited to being used as teaching resources.

Biographical Note

Victoria Stead (Deakin University, Australia)

Victoria Stead is an anthropologist and Australian Research Council DECRA Senior Research Fellow in the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University. Her research sits at the intersection of attention to race and labour relations, land and landscape, and the reverberations of (post)coloniality in Australia and across Australia-Pacific relations.

Melinda Hinkson (Deakin University, Australia)

Melinda Hinkson is an associate professor of anthropology at Deakin University and director of the independent Institute of Postcolonial Studies, Melbourne. Her latest research explores creative responses to disruption and visions of agricultural futures in regional Australia. Melinda has published widely on Aboriginal visual production, placemaking, the politics of representation, and the governance of Indigenous difference.