Browsing by Author "Kallio, Galina"
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- Academic Knowledge Production : Framework of Practical Activity in the Context of Transformative Food Studies
A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä(2020-11-25) Houtbeckers, Eeva; Kallio, GalinaWe have seen an emergence of transformative food studies as part of sustainability transitions. While some scholars have successfully opened up their experiences of pursuing transformation through scholar-activism, assumptions underlying researchers' choices and how scholars orient to and go about their work often remain implicit. In this article, we bring forth a practice theoretical understanding of knowledge production and advocate that researchers turn to examining their own research practice. We ask how to make our own academic knowledge production/research practice more explicit, and why it is important to do so in the context of transformative food studies. To help scholars to reflect on their own research practice, we mobilize the framework of practical activity (FPA). We draw on our own experiences in academia and use our ethnographic studies on self-reliant food production and procurement to illustrate academic knowledge production. Thus, this article provides conceptual and methodological tools for reflection on academic research practice and knowledge production. We argue that it is important for researchers to turn to and improve their own academic practice because it advances academic knowledge production in the domain of transformative food studies and beyond. While we position ourselves within the qualitative research tradition, we believe that the insights of this article can be applied more broadly in different research fields and across various methodological approaches. - Community supported agriculture & codesign
School of Arts, Design and Architecture | Master's thesis(2019) van Twuijver, WillAn increase in demand for organic locally produced food, the maturation of small-scale profitable farming practices, and a diversification in direct marketing models, such as Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), enable new business opportunities for (aspiring) farmers to develop small-scale food production systems. As these forms of production might play a more important role in transitioning towards sustainable local food production, insight is needed on under which premises they operate. That is why the objective of this thesis is to examine these developments from a co-design perspective. Because the field of design contains a broad notion of participation accompanied by a wide range of approaches, methods and tools, design can play an important role in identifying possible strategies that could help farmers understand and act upon the partnerships present in CSA. In reaching this objective, this thesis is an account of the planning process of a CSA subscription model at a starting farm in Finland. It describes how the farmer relates to other actors involved, what factors influence decisions and how the design of the subscription model (might) evolve over time. This research is comprised of three parts. The first part contains a desktop study on the overall developments of CSA, as well as an overview of different approaches in which people are involved in design processes. The second part follows the planning and decision making process of a CSA subscription model on a small-scale farm in Espoo, Finland, as well as an analysis of the planning and decision making process through a co-design lens and by linking the observations made of the case study to the overall developments of CSA. In the final part possible future scenarios and design approaches for the further development of the CSA model are identified. - Earth as common ground - to compare, contrast, and connect permaculture and vertical farming
School of Arts, Design and Architecture | Master's thesis(2020) Wen, XinquanIn the Helsinki metropolitan area, the first permaculture designed farm and the first vertical farm focusing on microgreen production were both registered as companies in 2016. Both concepts respond to the environmental damage caused by the abuse of pesticides and artificial fertilizers in conventional farming. Despite their current relatively small scale, their emergences are opening new paradigms for food production in Finland, which provide potential solutions to the environmental crises we are facing, including climate change, biodiversity loss, and land degradation. My master’s thesis combines ethnographic and action research to investigate permaculture and vertical farming practices and interpret sustainability from the perspective of food producers. By ethnographically studying routine, situated practices, the study investigates the values and knowledge embedded in both practices. The data originate from participant observation, interviews, and co-design workshops. Eco-modernism can be considered as the philosophical background of vertical farming. Although both public-facing discourses are built on the notion of environmental friendliness, permaculture and eco-modernism have drastically different perceptions of the relationships between human activities and nature. This work explores the mechanisms of permaculture and eco-modernism in practice. By comparing and contrasting permaculture with vertical farming, this thesis aims to reveal the complexity of sustainability. Multiple perspectives prevent the study from being constrained to one narrative. A relational ontology motivates the exploratory step to study the connection between permaculture and vertical farming through boundary objects. Two boundary objects were designed and utilised: growing media made of side streams; and mapping data on the geographical location of farms. Narrative analysis and thick description show the multiple layers of the concepts regarding sustainability, such as “local” and “organic”. Furthermore, the study shows that ethnographic research, co-design, and scientific exploration have great potential to benefit from each other. Further research includes more centralised research on how to identify and value the immeasurable contributions of farming practices. - The Growth Fetish Survival: a Critical Discourse Analysis on the Reproduction of the Growth Discourse in Italian Newspapers
School of Business | Master's thesis(2016) Fasoli, DanieleAs in the last decades the human population on Earth kept growing and developing at a constantly increasing pace, concerns about the threatening impact of human activities on the wider socio-ecological system started to arise within various academic fields. The emerging unsustainability of a societal model based on an infinite economic growth paradigm within a world characterized by finite resources, lead a variety of economists, environmentalists and sociologists to question its long-term viability, legitimacy and social entrenchment. Despite the advancement of many hypothesis and an ongoing discussion about the topic within the academic field, no empirical examples and practical insights have been given on how growth maximization (as measured by GDP) sustain itself as a primary national objective in many countries, how the beliefs behind its efficiency are spread and constantly re-established within societies and how GDP acquired through time a symbolic value (measure of social welfare) that transcends its initial purpose. This paper aims to provide such empirical example. With my research, starting from a social constructivist epistemology, I investigate how the discourse around economic growth is constructed and reiterated by a popular media (written newspapers) within an example of western society (Italy). For the purpose, I sampled 140 growth-related articles from the four most read newspaper in the country within the time-period Jan-April 2016 and analyzed them by using a properly adjusted Foucaultian three-dimensional framework for critical discourse analysis. The findings of this paper show the emergence of two antagonist discourses, one fostering a development paradigm based on economic growth and another challenging it. The main insights of this research show how a strong authoritative faction employs a direct, vague and well-established homogeneous linguistic register to deliver its preferred (pro-economic growth) meaning on the topic. Furthermore, control over public discourse access, as well as legitimization strategies such authorization, marginalization/derision of alternatives and rationalization of causal connections are exercised to foster the faction’s mental model of the economic system. On the other side, the persuasion strategy of the opposing faction utilizes a heterogenic linguistic register and seems to revolve around storytelling, exemplification, moralization and the creation of a systemic picture to foster curiosity within the reader. Overall, the strategy can be regarded as an attempt of “cracking” the well-established and socially agreed symbolic power of economic growth as well as showing the discrepancies and contradictions between actions and beliefs fostered by the opposing faction and re-negotiating established meanings. - Kopista ulos - tutkijat käytäntöteoreettisen tajun jäljillä
School of Business | D4 Julkaistu kehittämis- tai tutkimusraportti tai -selvitys(2015) Räsänen, Keijo; Apajalahti, Eeva-Lotta; Houtbeckers, Eeva; Kallio, Galina; Penttilä, AnuTeos kertoo perehtymisestä käytäntöteoreettisiin tutkimussuuntauksiin, jotka ovat ajankohtaisia monilla tutkimusalueilla. Tekstit käsittelevät ja edistävät keskeneräisiä, henkilökohtaisia oppimisprosesseja, joista ei ole tapana kertoa julkaisuissa. Kirja antaa realistisen kuvan tutkijoiden arjesta. Tutkimuskäytännön kehittämisessä ei ole kyse vain uuden sanaston omaksumisesta. Kirjasta selviää mitä muuta se vaatii. Kirjasta voi olla iloa erityisesti niille, jotka haluavat perehtyä käytäntöteorioihin tai muuten joutuvat käsittelemään suhdettaan tarjolla oleviin tutkimuskäytännön muotoihin. - The visible hands: An ethnographic inquiry into the emergence of food collectives as a social practice for exchange
School of Business | Doctoral dissertation (article-based)(2018) Kallio, GalinaMotivated by an observation that new forms of organizing and alternative practices for exchange increasingly transpire outside formal organizations, this doctoral dissertation adopts a social practice approach to study how food collectives emerged as a new practice for exchange. In doing so it challenges the dominance of markets as the focal explanatory concept of economic organization and shifts attention from organization as an entity to organization as emergent order. In studying the emergence of a new social practice, the dissertation draws on extensive, indepth ethnographic fieldwork on Finnish food collectives conducted during 2010-2017. Foodcollectives comprise of groups of households that collectively procure local and organic food directly from farmers and other suppliers and distribute it among the participating members. The data originate from participant and non-participant observation, interviews, meetings, social media discussions, documents, and archival material. The empirical findings of the dissertation suggest that the emergence of food collectives as a new practice for exchange was predominantly a tactical rather than discursive accomplishment requiring people to invent their ways of doing while engaging in a bundle of activities andcontinuously re-connecting different elements, including materiality, temporality, meanings,and embodied skills that were in constant flux (Essay 1). The findings further point towardstemporal and moral ordering effects of emerging social practices. The study identifies rhythmic qualities that enable people to sustain their food collective’s web of practices (Essay 2) and evaluative work that anchors common values in food collectives’ practices (Essay 3). Capitalizing on four distinct practice theoretical approaches this study advances organizational scholarship, particularly the emerging body of literature examining alternative forms of economic organizing, and contributes to practice theory. The study finds that in order toemerge, new social practices not only involve new ways of knowing and doing, but also require people to unlearn dominant ways of knowing and doing. The study brings further attention to a web of practices and shows how social practices emerge by transforming interactional orders of existing practices and by re-connecting them in new ways. The study also raises important questions on the relationship between people and practices and offers methodological guidance for studying phenomena on emergence.As the market economy is being increasingly contested at grassroots, the challenge for policymakers is to understand and better acknowledge the role of alternative forms of economic organizing in the transformation towards a more sustainable economic system.