Eighth International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

Farmers’ markets are a means to short-circuit the food supply chain, they are depicted in the alternative food literature as being able to re-connect consumers and producers, thus avoiding powerful intermediaries. They can also be analyzed in terms of the circulation of knowledge in a network of heterogeneous actors from institutions to farmers. From this perspective, to promote alternative food systems is necessary to circulate alternative knowledge and discourses through society. In order to describe how agroecological knowledge circulates and shape alternative food spaces, case studies from Tlaxcala farmer’s markets are presented. These markets attempt to become centers or nodes of a network that tries to advance agroecology, through instruments such as the Participatory Certification of Food Production. The analytical tools for this inquiry are mostly based on Actor-Network Theory (ANT), since ANT has being able to show the interplay between space, power and knowledge. Studying these spaces through their knowledge circulation and dynamics reveals the alliances, instruments, tactics and strategies at play as well as the divergences. In this way, the approach discloses the reach and length of the alternative food network in the context of the gradual capitalist integration of these spaces and practices.