Everyday Experts explains how knowledge built up through first-hand experience can help solve the crisis in the food system. It brings together fifty-seven activists, farmers, practitioners, researchers and community organisers from around the world in 28 original chapters to take a critical look at attempts to improve the dialogue between people whose knowledge has been marginalised in the past and others who are recognised as professional experts.
Using a combination of stories, poems, photos and videos, the contributors demonstrate how people’s knowledge can transform the food system towards greater social and environmental justice. Many of the chapters also explore the challenges of using action and participatory approaches to research.
Community engaged action research and food sovereignty in Canada is one of the chapters written by CFICE Food Security Hub Partners, Lauren Kepkewicz, Rolie Srivastava, Charles Levkoe, Abra Brynne and Cathleen Kneen.
This chapter focuses on nine community-university collaborations across Canada that took part in the action-based research project Community First: Impacts of Community Engagement: Community Food Security/Sovereignty Hub. It highlights the need to take concrete steps to ensure community engaged research better supports food sovereignty in Canada. It draws out three common lessons around the need to unpack assumptions around knowledge production; develop a shared vision of community-campus partnerships; and commit to building relationships over time. These lessons are discussed in relation to how they resonate with broader discussions in the transnational food sovereignty movement as well as the specific context of settler colonialism in Canada. The research also suggests that working within a settler colonial state such as Canada presents unique challenges for community-campus engagement.
To read a PDF copy of the chapter, click on the image below. To download the full book, please visit: http://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/areas-of-research/agroecology-water-resilience/our-publications/everyday-experts-how-peoples-knowledge-can-transform-the-food-system/
