Overview

This book identifies recognition-based systems of engagement and exchange within current alternative food networks, and demonstrates how these fluid micro-structures are fundamental to the development of alternative farming in an Irish context. The author confronts current prevailing discourse by proposing that internal structures of mutual recognition, rather than the market logic of productivist hybrids, underpin successful alternative farms. By adopting a Vygotskian developmental approach, necessarily grounded in communities of practice, the author recognises the expansion of alternative farming in the social-cultural context of ‘scaling out’, rather than in the clinical economic context of ‘scaling up’ which is currently supported by the Irish state. The book relies on Honneth’s recognition theory and theories of extended cognition as an analytical starting point. Volunteering, participatory observation, and interviewing shaped the immersive component of the research which supports this book, and which is influenced by grounded theory, critical theory and cognitive ethnography.

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9781527501768

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Tom Fitzsimons was a writer and researcher who lived in a Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking) community in the South West of Ireland. Having returned to education as a mature student, he completed a PhD in 2020 and sadly passed away in February 2021. This book is based on his doctoral research and continues his goal to contribute to scholarship on rural sociology, alternative agriculture and theoretical and conceptual debates on recognition and distributional cognition and contribute to the policy debate at an international level.

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