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Browsing Faculty Publications by Author "Sbicca, Joshua, author"

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    Collaborative concession in food movement networks: the uneven relations of resource mobilization
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2019-05-21) Sbicca, Joshua, author; Luxton, India, author; Hale, James, author; Roeser, Kassandra, author; MDPI AG, Basel, Switzerland, publisher
    How do food movements prioritize and work to accomplish their varied and often conflicting social change goals at the city scale? Our study investigates the Denver food movement with a mixed methods social network analysis to understand how organizations navigate differences in power and influence vis-à-vis resource exchange. We refer to this uneven process with the analytical concept of "collaborative concession". The strategic resource mobilization of money, land, and labor operates through certain collaborative niches, which constitute the priorities of the movement. Among these are poverty alleviation and local food production, which are facilitated by powerful development, education, and health organizations. Therefore, food movement networks do not offer organizations equal opportunity to carry out their priorities. Concession suggests that organizations need to lose something to gain something. Paradoxically, collaboration can produce a resource gain. Our findings provide new insights into the uneven process by which food movement organizations-and city-wide food movements overall-mobilize.
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    Food, gentrification, and the changing city
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2018) Sbicca, Joshua, author; FUHEM Ecosocial, publisher
    Food offers a visceral entry point into the politics and processes of gentrification. Traditional explanations of gentrification - when a neighborhood experiences disinvestment and economic decline followed by "revitalization" and "redevelopment" - hinge on either political economy or cultural drivers. This article discusses the relationship between these two drivers to show how food gentrification is multifaceted and changes neighborhood class and ethnoracial demographics, foodscapes and foodways, and housing. First, poor communities in cities around the world can experience the deleterious effects of food driving gentrification, like when developers use urban agriculture to attract new residents and increase property values. Second, food itself is being gentrified, which for communities marginalized by their race or ethnicity means both the dispossession of culturally important foods that are made "cool" and become unaffordable and the upscaling of food retail that displaces former bars, cafes, restaurants, grocery stores, and gardens. The article concludes with a brief discussion of some social movement strategies and policy approaches that might prevent the harmful effects of food gentrification.
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    Solidarity and sweat equity: for reciprocal food justice research
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2015) Sbicca, Joshua, author; Thomas A. Lyson Center for Civic Agriculture and Food Systems, publisher
    Researchers committed to food justice often enter communities and nonprofits with a desire to help. They often think there is a scarcity, such as food, that they want to understand and help to increase. At the same time, research obligations may lead to extracting "findings" without advancing food justice. Such actions may unintentionally work against food justice, especially the goal of dismantling structural inequalities and advancing social equity. This commentary chronicles the ongoing and incomplete process by which I have carried out food justice research and worked toward food justice. In short, reciprocal research requires working with, not for, organizations and communities. This entails ongoing acts of solidarity. One way to express this is through flexibility with research goals in order to tailor all or parts of one’s project to answer questions that increase understanding of how to challenge structural inequalities and advance social equity. Relatedly, openness to how food justice activists and organizations confront the food movement and society more broadly to address whiteness, privilege, racial inequality, and notions of diversity can enrich critical social science. Of equal importance is sweat equity. Most food justice activists and organizations have few resources and cannot serve the whims of researchers. Therefore, providing labor is an important allied act. This increases the researchers' empathy with activists, organizations, and communities, and creates opportunities to build trust and dissolve social boundaries. To enter into a situation that deepens our knowledge of the food justice movement and advances food justice requires solidarity and sweat equity.