2026-09-24T03:09:17Z https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-uni-passau/oai

oai:kobv.de-opus4-uni-passau:1583 2025-08-13 bibliography:false doc-type:PhDThesis open_access ddc ddc:300

Affective Roots: Memory, emotions and viscerality within organic agri-food networks in Tamil Nadu, India 0000-0003-4542-4600 Enid Still 300 Affect Organic Agriculture Tamil Nadu Feminist Political Ecology Epistemic injustice 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. Universität Passau Passau Innstrasse 29, 94032 Passau Martina A. Padmanabhan Andrea J. Nightingale 2025-01-10 2025-05-06 PhDThesis Text urn:nbn:de:bvb:739-opus4-15838 application/pdf eng Creative Commons - CC BY-SA - Namensnennung - Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen 4.0 International thesis.doctoral Universität Passau Passau Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät 1 https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-uni-passau/oai/container/index/docId/1583 https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-uni-passau/frontdoor/index/index/docId/1583