We do more of...

• The production side of things (farming).
• Qualitative analysis, drawing heavily upon theory from Human Geography, Political Ecology, and Science and Technology Studies (STS).
• We'll get into some critical social theory as a result of this, including agrarian political economy (i.e. Marx-ish), post-structuralist (i.e. Foucault-ier), and posthumanist (i.e. Haraway-esque) hot takes. Many people who grow the food we eat don't take this kind of thing overly seriously, and neither will we.
• We do some quantitative analysis as well, inflected with some irony, not losing sight of the fact that many of the practices we discuss are not readily measurable.
• Exploring the people, times, and places that developed ideas like organic farming, "re"-localization, urban agriculture, and so forth.
• Naming the bad stuff, including eugenics, imperialism, overt and covert racism, and genocide. Before reading week, the seminar can go to some pretty dark places: be warned. It does, however, get better by the end.

We do less of...

• The consumption side of things (eating).
• Quantitative analysis, although there are quite a few Science and Nature papers that end up on the reading list, and we take a careful look at them.
• Things with clear, conclusive, and unambiguously practical application. There are no easy answers here (but there are many, many interesting—and sometimes inspiring—ones).
• Advocacy for specific agricultural practices. This is not a place to learn why organic farming is better than conventional (or vice versa) or to gain skills to destroy your agri-food debating opponents.
• "Solving for x," disrupting, accelerating, scaling, moonshots, side-hustling, or moving fast and breaking things. Well, maybe some breaking things, but we do our best to put them back together in weird, new, and beautiful ways. Despite the implied gripes of this list, we are highly supportive of innovative and entrepeneurial ideas and offer a very open-ended final project to explore some of this potential.

Course Synopsis

Multi-disciplinary seminar on sustainable food systems. Explores multiple roots and considers possible futures of four contemporary practices which claim to enact a more sustainable approach to producing and consuming food: organic farming, local food, controlled environment agriculture and alternative proteins, and food justice / sovereignty. Includes three Friday work visits to the Yale Farm at the end of the semester.

Approach to Critique

Particularly in the early classes, this seminar runs heavy on the "critical" and light on the "creative." It's quite possible that some ideas that inspire and motivate you today will end up as the target of sharp critique. Don't despair! Underlying this approach is the belief that we need new kinds of interventions—technical, social, structural—to address problems that might not even be readily apparent today. The role of critique is to help steer clear of dead ends and guard against negative unintended consequences, and steer towards spaces of possibility. The end goal is not to prescribe beneficial interventions using today's alternative proposals, but to develop an approach that can asssess which sorts of actions open up new possibilities and which sorts of action might be a waste of your (valuable) time. We don't want to send smart Yale students off to repeat well-worn mistakes, and critique provides a powerful way to be proactive in this regard. Building thoughful and plausible counterfactual scenarios in the seminar room that ask, "what if..." can save untold years of frustration in the future (and may render some expensive randomized controlled social experiments unecessary).

If you didn't pre-register...

There is still hope! Because the seminar went into the calendar later than usual, we anticipate some openings for Spring 2020. Send mark.bomford@yale.edu an email with "CSYC 321 waitlist?" in the title and come shop this Tuesday, January 13.