Affective Roots: Memory, emotions and viscerality within organic agri-food networks in Tamil Nadu, India

For activists I met in Chennai, the capital city of Tamil Nadu in India, organic food and farming was a ‘way of life’. Stemming from my curiosity about this statement and what it meant for different actors in the regional organic agri-food networks, this research explores the interconnected lives and livelihoods of organic farmers and activists in Tamil Nadu. To engage with the social dynamics of these agri-food networks, the research focuses in on the role of the affective, feeling body. The emphasis on affect emerged in the form of memories, emotions and visceral experience, from empirical data collected between 2020 and 2022. And as the thesis demonstrates, affective dimensions, or what moves people, are important because, unlike economic, statistical or structural perspectives, they make visible the ways different actors feel socio-ecological change. Adopting the lens of Feminist Political Ecology and drawing on the fields of historical anthropology and feminist ethics, this thesis highlights: (1) the enduring nature of epistemic injustice within agri-food relations, (2) how social boundaries are built, maintained and remade through affective encounters, circumscribing what I call the ‘affective roots’ of socio-ecological change and (3) how ambiguous affective relations co-constitute organic agri-food networks, shaping anxious environmental subjectivities, that stem from socially mediated encounters with agro-chemicals, the market, the landscape and the other. Deepening our understanding of socio-ecological and agrarian change through empirical inquiry into how people feel matters, I argue, because it sheds light on injustices that are often concealed beneath the clouds of crisis.

Level thesis:degree_level

thesis.doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher

Universität Passau

Year

2025

Author dc:creator

• Still, Enid

Contributors dc:contributor

• Padmanabhan, Martina A.
• Nightingale, Andrea J.

• Affect
• Organic Agriculture
• Tamil Nadu
• Feminist Political Ecology
• Epistemic injustice

Statement dc:rights

• Creative Commons - CC BY-SA - Namensnennung - Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen 4.0 International

Repository record source_url

https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-uni-passau/frontdoor/index/index/docId/1583

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:kobv.de-opus4-uni-passau:1583