Characterizing food systems to better understand their vulnerabilities: a case study in Québec and São Paulo

Characterizing food systems, i.e., describing their organizational features, can help to generate a better understanding of the structural vulnerabilities that constrain transitions towards sustainable food security. However, their characterization across different economic contexts remains challenging. In this paper, by linking key concepts from research on food regimes, food system vulnerabilities and responsible innovation, we aim to characterize food systems in a developing and a developed economy to identify their shared vulnerabilities. We applied a case study design to characterize food production, processing and distribution in the province of Québec (Canada) and in the state of São Paulo (Brazil). In both cases, the processing and distribution stages have higher economic predominance when compared to the agricultural production stage. Furthermore, we observed concentration in a few activities in both food systems, with a shared focus on export-oriented supply chains. Vulnerabilities in both food systems include: (1) increased interdependence because some supply chains are export-oriented or depend on foreign labor and are, therefore, exposed to external risks;(2) concentration in a few activities, which threatens present and future local food diversity and (3) unequal power relations, making small and medium players vulnerable to decisions made by big players. The characterization developed in this study shows that the two food systems are mainly pursuing economic goals, following the institutional logics of the neoliberal food regime, which are not necessarily aligned with food security goals. It also exposes the presence of characteristics of ‘responsibility' that may eventually help overcome food systems' vulnerabilities and support transitions toward sustainability.

Introduction

Individualised employment relations formed a key pillar of the shift to neoliberal economic policy in the 1980s, complementing other dimensions of orthodoxy deployed across governments, public administrations and central banks in the same time. In the neoliberal narrative, market forces would ‘naturally' and justly compensate labour for its contribution to productivity, like any other input to production. Consequently, redistributive institutions empowering workers to win more adequate wages and conditions (through minimum wages, Awards, unionisation, and collective bargaining) were dramatically eroded, or discarded entirely. Combined with welfare state retrenchment, this restructuring of labour market policy increased the pressure on people to sell their labour, and under terms over which workers wielded little influence. Since then, forms of insecure, non-standard work have proliferated globally, and employment relations have been increasingly individualised. Now, most workers in Anglo-Saxon market economies, and a growing proportion of workers in European and Nordic nations, rely on individual contract instruments (underpinned only by minimum wage floors typically far below living wage benchmarks) to set the terms and conditions of employment. Wages have stagnated, the share of GDP going to workers has declined, and inequality and poverty (even among employed people) has intensified. More recently, after years of this employer-friendly hegemony in workplace relations, successive crises (first the GFC and then the COVID-19 pandemic) have more obviously shattered traditional expectations of a natural linkage between economic growth and workers' living standards.After a generation of experience with this individualised model of employment relations, and with the human costs of that approach becoming ever-more obvious, there is renewed concern with reimagining policies and structures which could support improvements in job quality, stability, and compensation. Important policy dialogue and innovation is now occurring in many industrial countries, in response to the negative consequences of neoliberal labour market policies. In those conversations, institutions like collective bargaining have returned to centre stage.

The point is to change it: Locating community geography and praxis in a neoliberalizing academia

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the multiple issues we are confronting at the contemporary moment, geographers are faced with the critical task of finding ways to address and grapple with these concerns. This commentary advocates for community geography as an important praxis-oriented intervention that utilizes theory and methods for community issues. However, the practice of community geography is constrained by academia's neoliberalizing terrain, whereby a globalizing deployment of ‘publish-or-perish' productivity has been reconfiguring what geographers can and ought to be doing. By going against the neoliberal grain and practicing community geography, the possibilities for theoretical innovation and political potentials open up towards a geography that is socially relevant and directly addresses issues affecting the lives of marginalized community members. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Dialogues in Human Geography is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Assistência Social no ajuste fiscal: pandemia e gestão da força de trabalho

O presente artigo objetiva discutir aspectos recentes da política de assistência social brasileira, considerando a incidência da radicalização do projeto neoliberal sobre seus serviços e as características de sua intervenção no contexto da pandemia da Covid-19. Elegemos como mote de análise central a relação entre a referida política e a gestão da força de trabalho mais precarizada e empobrecida, que no geral têm composto o público-alvo deste campo de proteção social. Tomando como base os fundamentos da crítica marxista da política social, a abordagem da assistência social procura desvelar as contradições inerentes a esta política de seguridade social, problematizando os principais elementos do endurecimento do ajuste fiscal no Brasil. Essas reflexões sedimentam as bases para a análise acerca da condição dessa política na gestão da força de trabalho mais empobrecida a partir das determinações da pandemia da Covid-19. A pesquisa, de natureza qualitativa, se assenta em revisão bibliográfica e análise de dados empíricos de fonte primária e secundária.Alternate :This article aims to discuss recent aspects of Brazilian social assistance policy, considering the incidence of the radicalization of the neoliberal project on its services and the characteristics of its intervention in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. We chose as a central analysis theme the relationship between the aforementioned policy and the management of the most precarious and impoverished workforce, which in general have made up the target audience of this field of social protection. Based on the foundations of the Marxist critique of social policy, the approach to social assistance seeks to reveal the contradictions inherent in this social security policy, questioning the main elements of the tightening of fiscal adjustment in Brazil. These reflections solidify the bases for the analysis about the condition of this policy in the management of the most impoverished workforce from the determinations of the Covid-19 pandemic. The research, of a qualitative nature, is based on a literature review and analysis of empirical data from primary and secondary sources.

Trabalho docente na educação básica no Brasil sob indústria 4.0

O objetivo do artigo é analisar o trabalho docente na Educação Básica no Brasil, especialmente a partir de 2020, quando se instaura a Pandemia Covid-19, em meio à difusão do teletrabalho no bojo da Indústria 4.0, sob o aprofundamento do Neoliberalismo e da Nova Gestão Pública (NGP). A metodologia foi baseada em estudos bibliográficos, documentais e relatórios de pesquisas, bem como análise de dados do Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE) e Instituto Nacional de Estudos e Pesquisas Educacionais Anísio Teixeira (INEP), em períodos selecionados. Os resultados indicam a difusão do teletrabalho sob o neoliberalismo e a NGP, implicando no aprofundamento da já precarizada carreira do profissional docente sob a pandemia.Alternate :The objective of the article is to analyze the teaching work in Basic Education in Brazil, especially from 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic was declared, boosting the diffusion of telework in the context of Industry 4.0, the deepening of neoliberalism and the New Public Management (NGP). The methodology was based on bibliographic, documentary and research reports, as well as data analysis from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) and National Institute of Educational Studies and Research Anísio Teixeira (INEP), in selected periods. The results indicate the spread of telework under neoliberalism and NGP, implying the deepening of the already precarious career of professional teaching under the pandemic.

Guest editorial: Playful literacies across ages and contexts: new horizons for pleasure, affect, and living texts

During the COVID-19 pandemic, educators observed increased student stress and disconnection in formal learning environments, whereas young people turned to playing, gaming and collaborative writing to cultivate connections during this upheaval. Using Thiel's previous theoretical work, Woodard and colleagues explore playful dramatizing, multimodal composing and science learning through one fourth-grade girl's video about food chains. [...]Beauchemin and Qin take up affect as relational and performed forces that emerge from the inbetweenness among people, objects and material and discursive contexts. [...]in "Press Play,” community leader Karl André St-Victor describes how playful practices at Chalet Kent, a community youth center in Montréal, sustain strong senses of belonging and companionship among youth and center staff.

Indústria 4.0: serviço social no sistema previdenciário em tempos da pandemia de COVID-19

Este texto discute o cenário do trabalho de assistentes sociais (AS) da Previdência Social (PS) no Brasil, a partir da pandemia do novo coronavírus, COVID-19. Busca evidenciar como AS responderam à pandemia, em termos do seu trabalho e quais as principais mudanças ocorridas na PS nesse período. Utiliza-se de uma entrevista semiestruturada na forma de grupo focal com AS da PS. A ênfase fundamental recai sobre os processos de informatização dos benefícios previdenciários e teletrabalho correspondendo ao aprofundamento do neoliberalismo e maior fragilização do trabalho.Alternate :This text discusses the work scenario of social workers (SW) of Brazilian Social Security (BSS) from the pandemic of the new coronavirus, COVID-19. It seeks to highlight how SW responded to the pandemic, in terms of their work and what the main changes occurred in BSS during this period. It uses a semi-structured interview in the form of a focus group with SW of BSS. The fundamental emphasis is on the computerization processes of social security benefits and telework, corresponding to the deepening of neoliberalism and greater weakening of work.

Knowledge socialism in the COVID-19 era: A collective exploration of needs, forms, and possibilities

The inspiration for this collective writing project began with a digital conference entitled ‘Knowledge Socialism, COVID-19 and the New Reality of Education' held at Beijing Normal University. In this conference and through this article, multiple researchers spread across six continents have engaged in the collaborative task of outlining emerging innovations and alternative contingencies towards education, international collaboration, and digital reform in this time of global crisis. Trends associated with digital education, knowledge openness, peer production, and collective intelligence as articulated by Michael A. Peters' conception of Knowledge Socialism are given careful analysis and exploration. Some of the members of this collective endeavor to identify problems, others, begin to draw boxes around potential solutions. Overall, this article engages with real world challenges and innovations that look beyond dominant neoliberal trends in the knowledge economy to build bridges toward novel possibilities in this era of rapid digital change.

"CRISIS TRANSFORMATIONISM AND THE DE-RADICALISATION OF DEVELOPMENT EDUCATION IN A NEW GLOBAL GOVERNANCE LANDSCAPE

This article critically considers the implications of ‘crisis transformationism' for development education's radical agenda of cultivating politically engaged, self-reflexive global citizens who have a deep understanding of power and politics and who are firmly committed to working collectively toward fundamental change.1 Crisis transformationism is a mobilising ideological framework which deploys crisis rhetoric in order to consolidate the corporate takeover of education from a democratically controlled system to one designed and run by private actors in service of the global economy. In this article, we demonstrate how this takeover has accelerated in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. We draw on the 2022 United Nations' Transforming Education Summit (TES) as exemplary of a growing trend in global educational governance whereby the values and interests of global corporations - through the ascendancy of Big Tech philanthropic foundations - increasingly shape educational policy and programming. Our primary purpose is to consider the implications of crisis transformationism for the future of development education's genuinely transformative goal of achieving global and ecological justice. Applying critical discourse analytic techniques, we explore the ways in which the discourse of crisis transformationism is being deployed by influential policy actors to legitimise the expansion of the private sector in the delivery of education and to accelerate depoliticised notions of the ‘global' via a skillification agenda premised on the acquisition of neurologically-inflected social-emotional skills or competencies which seeks to yield a productive (i.e., mentally healthy, resilient and skilled) workforce and a pliable, politically docile citizenry. © 2023, Centre for Global Education. All rights reserved.

COVID-19 and the Case Against Neoliberalism: The United Kingdom's Political Pandemic

This book seeks to better understand the meaning and implications of the UKs calamitous encounter with the COVID-19 global pandemic for the future of British neoliberalism. Construing COVID-19 as a political pandemic and mobilising a novel applied political philosophy approach, the authors cultivate fresh intellectual resources, both analytical and normative, to better understand why the UK failed the COVID-19 test and how it might ‘fail forward' so as to strengthen its resilience. COVID-19 they argue, has intercepted the UK government's decades-long experimentation with neoliberalism at what appears to be a threshold moment in this model's life course. Neoliberalism has served as a key progenitor of the country's vulnerability: the pandemic has cruelly unveiled the failings of neoliberal logics and legacies which have placed the country at elevated risk and hampered its response. The pandemic in turn has attenuated underlying systemic maladies inherent in British neoliberalism and served as a great disruptor and potential accelerant of history;a consequential episode in the tumultuous life of this politico-economic model. To meaningfully ‘build back better', a true renaissance of social democracy is needed. Drawing upon the neorepublican tradition of political philosophy, the authors confront neoliberalism's hegemonic but parochial concept of human freedom as non-interference and place the neorepublican idea of freedom as non-domination in the service of building a new UK social contract. This book will be of interest to political philosophers, political geographers, medical sociologists, public-health scholars, and epidemiologists, to stakeholders engaged in the public inquiry processes now gathering momentum globally and to architects of build back better programmes, especially in western advanced capitalist economies. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

Crise sanitária e atenção primária: a atuação de assistentes sociais nos territórios

Este artigo focaliza a atuação de assistentes sociais na atenção primária em saúde (APS), na pandemia do Covid-19. Discute a crise sanitária, problematizando a ofensiva ultraneoliberal e suas implicações na atenção primária em saúde cuja potencialidade assistencial foi esvaziada por meio de várias medidas tomadas pelo Governo Federal, como mudanças na Política Nacional de Atenção Básica e o Previne Brasil. Foi realizada pesquisa nos Anais do IX Congresso Nacional de Serviço Social em Saúde, destacando trabalhos sobre APS. Foi desenvolvida análise com base no materialismo-histórico-dialético, considerando a historicidade, mediações e contradições. Foram identificados desafios à atuação profissional, como o uso de Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação (TIC), o teletrabalho, a precarização da política de saúde. Entre as estratégias de ação utilizadas destacam-se: ações educativas, articulação com a rede socioassistencial, entre outras. Considera-se que a negação de direitos como método governamental distancia o horizonte emancipatório do projeto ético-político da profissão.Alternate :The article focuses on the role of social workers in primary health care (PHC) during the covid-19 pandemic. It discusses the health crisis, questioning the ultra-neoliberal offensive and its implications for primary health care, which its care potential has been emptied, through various measures taken by the Federal Government, such as changes in the National Primary Care Policy and Previne Brasil. Research was carried out in the Annals of the IX National Congress of Social Service in Health, highlighting works on PHC. An analysis was developed based on dialectical-historical-materialism, considering historicity, mediations and contradictions. Challenges to professional performance were identified, such as the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), teleworking, and the precariousness of health policy. Among the action strategies used, the following stand out: educational actions, articulation with the social assistance network, among others. It is considered that the denial of rights as a governmental method distances the emancipatory horizon from the ethical-political project of the profession.

Drawing matters

As the faculties of literacy and numeracy are universally recognized as worthy of pedagogical nurturing, so this article champions an older, graphic articulacy: visualcy. An articulacy with the language of drawing that distinguishes the visual arts from other disciplines. Its nurturing has been compromised by the shift away from teaching drawing in UK secondary schools and HE art schools, even before COVID. We argue that this shift is in part a consequence - perhaps unintended - of the neo-liberal values permeating the UK education sector. The article presents a critique of the those values seen as a significant obstacle to drawing's educational benefits, and offers an optimistic basis for its place in the curriculum.

Autonomous Musicians and Neoliberal Rationality in the Music Industry of the Digital Age

The music industry, although not a recent activity, has been under new configurations since digital platforms and recording tools became popular among freelance musicians. The emergence of new artists in this market makes us think about how subjects are mobilized to deal with these devices and, more than that, how contact with the new labor front enhances informal work. Through a theoretical essay that correlates the concepts of "shock doctrine" (KLEIN, 2 2007) and "neoliberal understanding " (FOUCAU, 2001) with musical work, it is sought as an autonomous musician to incorporate neoliberal behaviors and discourses. More than observing the causes and consequences of this outbreak, the movement that has been transforming a creation of itself, the entrepreneur of respect. Thus, it is intended how the artists -namely: new autonomous musicians -deal with the work of phonographic production in digital. As a focus of analysis, I sometimes use experiences of Aracaju singers, who work actively, at least in productions, the beginning of 2021, when the Aldir Blanc law, instituted during the COVID-19 pandemic, stimulated the artistic class through public notices.

Do What You Love? New Music, New Work—After 2020: JM

This article analyzes musical labor and notions of love in relation to gig work with a focus on musicians in new music in New York City. Working in new music as a gig worker entails many skills, many tasks, and many jobs, which hardly guarantee a release from precarity. Meanwhile the neoliberal myth of a "labor of love” propagates the conviction that love and hard work can overcome any challenge, including those posed by racialized and gendered difference. The account of contemporary musical labor I offer concurs with recent critiques of the complicity of new music discourse with neoliberal agendas. Yet I argue that even as contemporary practices of musical work demonstrate how new music is entrepreneurial work embedded in a capitalist system, the everyday experiences of working musicians confound a totalizing account of the neoliberal agenda. Musical work takes place alongside and despite neoliberalism. Based on ethnography and interviews, I argue that the unsettled norms of musical gig work in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic brought to the fore ways in which musical work is more than the perfect manifestation of exploitable "labors of love.”

Responsible tourists in the time of Covid-19?

COVID-19 effectively stopped tourism mobilities for a time. Theoretically, this qualitative study draws on the notion of responsibility, as in responsibility to act and responsibility to Otherness. We explore how, during the pandemic, Norwegian tourists dealt with infection preventive measures, how they changed travel habits and how the pandemic transformed their thinking on tourism and climate change. The tourists were loyal citizens adhering to the authorities' measures and refrained from international holidays, thereby taking responsibility for the governmentally enforced dugnad (collective efforts). This temporal change in travel habits, however, was not expected to become the new normal, as warmer, southern destinations were still desired. Culturally embedded neoliberal values of freedom of movement were, for most of these tourists, stronger than the threat of climate crisis. Fatalistically, we conclude that COVID-19 did not have the power to transform their mind-sets regarding responsible tourism futures and free them from neoliberal shackles. © The Author(s) 2023.

Taking Class Seriously

This article critically analyzes the human rights perspective upon what has emerged as one of the most significant socioeconomic and political challenges confronting many millions of people residing within high-income, liberal-democratic societies: rising poverty and socioeconomic inequality. This article argues that international and domestic human rights law and the social and political imaginaries of the wider human rights community largely fail to adequately diagnose and effectively respond to poverty and inequality within high-income, liberal-democratic societies. As a political and ethical doctrine founded upon a normative commitment to social justice, human rights should be taking the lead in efforts to condemn, understand, and develop responses to the poverty and inequality which blight the lives of many millions of people within many of the world's most affluent and, allegedly, most "liberal” societies. Human rights law has historically not done so. We, as a community, have not done so. This article offers a specific explanation for this continuing failure, by focusing upon the absence of any concerted recognition of or engagement with social class as it contributes to and compounds our exposure to poverty and inequality. Human rights remain largely blind to the many ways in which social class is intricately connected to poverty and inequality. The human rights community within high-income, liberal-democratic societies characteristically fails to take class seriously. Building upon previous writing in this area, this article explains why class is rarely recognized or engaged with by the human rights community. This article also sets out the basis for how we might begin the task of overcoming this highly damaging class blindness, to set the stage for what the author asserts as an urgent need if human rights is to provide the kind of political and ethical leadership required to effectively engage with poverty and inequality in affluent societies: the degentrification of human rights.

Pandemic Geopolitics in the Anthropocene

The COVID-19 pandemic has simultaneously highlighted the extraordinary transformations of the contemporary earth system that are currently underway and the fragility of the political institutions in place that might offer some governance of human affairs in these novel circumstances. The pandemic response has, in places, generated retrograde geopolitical impulses to xenophobia and in others clear indications that international cooperation is crucial for dealing with disasters. The spectre of a deadly zoonotic diseases has once again raised questions of how human encroachment on animal species, both in supposedly wild spaces, and the very tamed ones of industrial agriculture, threatens a global civilization. The big question this all raises is whether novel governance mechanisms, taking ecological science seriously, will emerge from the pandemic wreckage in time to effectively tackle the accelerating climate change crisis which threatens further disruption of both human and natural systems. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

Suicidal Economy of Turkey in Times of Crisis: 2018 Crisis and Beyond

This article aims to explain the political-economic character of the increasing suicides in Turkey since 2018 that stem from indebtedness, poverty, and unemployment. It frames the acts as economy-relevant suicides to emphasize the embeddedness of these suicides within the neoliberal transformation and its consequences at the global and national levels. In this regard, the study traces the trajectory of neoliberalism in Turkey from 1980 to the COVID-19 pandemic, and critically evaluates the political and economic decisions of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government to reveal the causal links with the increasing number of suicides. The study argues that two aspects of neoliberalization have paved the way for the post-2018 suicides: the declining political and economic power of the working class and the outcomes of financialization such as long-term unemployment and indebtedness. Thus, it argues that economy-relevant suicides are pathologic but depict political character, regardless of their effectiveness as a political strategy, given the consequences of the neoliberal transformation and political choices in due course. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Critical Sociology (Sage Publications, Ltd.) is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)