SPECIAL ISSUE

 

Making time to care differently for food: The case for the Armidale Food School

 

 

Jennifer Mae Hamilton^#; Nicolette Larder

University of New England

 

 

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ABSTRACT

This paper provides the scholarly rationale for the proposed Armidale Food School (AFS) in terms of investigating care's role in the future of learning. We use Maria Puig de la Bellacasa's influential study of care and environment to ground the analysis. Puig (2017) argues that undoing the ecological and social harms of the agri-food system requires time to tend to plants and soil in different and slower ways. We argue that making time for these ideal forms of ecological care is difficult in the new 'asset' economy. Time is used up working in office jobs to service increasing financial burdens of education and mortgage debt. Grounded in traditions of radical and anti -colonial pedagogy and postcapitalist politics, AFS teaches students to think in expansive, critical, and practical ways about the barriers to these ideal forms of care while seeding changes in social practice in relation to the food system.

Keywords: agri-food system, alternative agriculture, asset economy, care, mortgage debt, radical pedagogy, time-use.

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Introduction

The following article makes the case for Armidale Food Schiool(AFS). The school is a research-informed pedagogical project situated in a para-academic space: designed by tenured academics but offered at minimal cost in a community space. It sits neither fully inside, nor wholly outside the University. In this regard, AFS is both a pedagogical project and a provocation to the debt-driven University system as a whole. It is designed to transform time use by the mortgage class in relation to food practices by minimising debt accrued through higher education. In addition, the paper is a proposal for a pedagogical project that is seeking to address the problems of the food system specifically in relation to climate change and coloniality from the point of view of labour. To do this, we argue, is not a matter of needing new knowledge as such- there are a host of established indigenous, regenerative and/or permacultural style production practices that are capable of addressing the harms-rather the larger challenge relates to time-use habits and social practice norms. We contend the mortgage class needs to find new ways to arrange time in order to practice, what we call, 'caring differently for food'. The making of time for such practices, we hypothesise, will enable the beginnings of larger scale material transformations of the food system to address climate change and ongoing colonisation in Australia.

The design of this project is explicitly a critical counterpoint to the way that universities currently implicitly imagine care for both students and the environment in the education of the next generation. In other words, despite policies imploring the development of graduate attributes and learning outcomes, 'care and the future of learning' within the debt-driven Australian neoliberal university is currently imagined, almost solely, in terms of the student's future employability (see Australian Government, 2021). There is no holistic vision of environmental care in the university: regenerative agriculturalists are trained alongside those using less environmentally friendly methods, petroleum engineers are trained alongside photovoltaic ones. Thus, a student can choose a career in the sustainability 'sector' as one option among many, or she can choose something different altogether. Speaking specifically as educators in the Australian system, we can claim to care for students if we uphold a duty of care in the classroom and succeed in delivering learning outcomes. We care for students if they are educated enough to secure a job and, ideally also, a mortgage on a house, and that the job is high paid enough to enable the repayments of both their educational and their housing debts. In this logic, there is neither an economic incentive to train students to think critically about how mundane practices at home and at work are related to environmental harms, nor is there a necessary imperative to directly care for the environment alongside students' futures. Thus, in this paper, we reconceptualise care in relation to 'the future of learning' in a holistic sense, combining a basic duty of care we have for students with Puig de la Bellacasa's (2017) theory of care for the environment.

In making the case for the value of a grassroots, locally based school, we suggest that such an approach, while small-scale, may be transformative of the food and agriculture system at large. This is because, like Schmid and Smith, we see 'capitalist social relations to be material, extensive and durable, yet simultaneously contingent and vulnerable' (2020: 264). Following the postcapitalist approach of economic geographers Gibson-Graham (2006), we are interested in and open to the possibilities of change, starting from where we already are: time poor, debt addled and in Armidale. This is a political imaginary that envisions transformation as possible through performing new subjects and socio-economic relations. That is, underlying the approach of AFS is the idea that the everyday and habitual routines practiced at the level of the household, are at the core of the reproduction of economic and social systems, such as the agri-food system. We draw on the tradition of radical pedagogy to think explicitly about caring for people and planet in a time of climate change. Specifically, we have designed a course that combines theory and practice to ask big social, economic, and political questions about why we do not spend more time doing things that are known to be good for the environment and, at the same time, foster new material time-use practices geared towards caring for the environment via caring for food. The theory of change that underpins this proposal combines social practice theory (Shove, et al., 2012) and post-capitalist politics (Gibson-Graham, 2006) with ideas from the 'third university' (la paperson, 2017).

The article is a scholarly proposal broken into several sections. We outline the contours of the problem, first making clear the relationship between mortgage debt, time and the food system and the problems of the food system in relation to climate change and coloniality. We then move to fully define the mortgage-debt-education-work nexus (MDEW) and explain what we mean by 'making time to care differently for food'. We conclude by situating the pedagogical proposal in a tradition of radical teaching and transformative agricultural projects and share the draft syllabus. We envision this project to take place on Anaiwan Country in Armidale, in the northern tablelands of New South Wales, Australia. Although we make specific reference to local concerns, we also have designed the proposal to contain some generalisable macro-economic, ecological and political ideas such that the proposal is modifiable for other places.

 

How debt and time structures our relationship with food

We identify the need to learn how to make time to care differently for food because of the way debt-as a product of both higher education, work, and housing-structures time. We show below how the food practices of the time-poor mortgage class perpetuate the productivist agri -food system because it is hard to consume food in Australia outside it. The productivist agri-food system- 'super-charged, homogenous and monofunctional ... shaped by the practices of high input and yielding, highly technical, narrowly profit-oriented agri-business' (Mackay & Perkins, 2019: 9)-receives large investment in terms of energy, finance, resources, and planning that gives it a 'thick legitimacy' (Montenegro De Wit & Iles, 2016). It is largely based around chemical-heavy, export-orientated, competitive systems of production where monocultures are widespread, and land is farmed intensively to maximise yield. But, in Australia, on the whole, it yields convenient, cheap food for time-poor people who need it between work, school, and other caring responsibilities.

By exploring the structural politics of the mortgage class's food habits, we have identified the need for a pedagogical project capable of changing the material practices of this privileged sector of society toward different relations with food and thus different social and ecological ends. Our focus on the mortgage class as a coherent group draws on emerging scholarship on the 'asset economy' (Adkins, et al., 2019; Adkins, et al., 2021) which posits that, within the current financialised capitalist economy, asset ownership, especially in the form of private housing, has overtaken wage labour as the defining feature of class structure. We refer to the 'mortgage class' as the 35 percent of people in Australia who currently have access to mortgage debt for home ownership (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2021). We note that even as aspiration to join the mortgage class remains high - 74 percent of private renters aspire to move to home ownership (Stone, et al., 2020: 24) - the ability of those not already in this class to join it in terminal decline. Home ownership among all but the oldest households has fallen continually since the 1980s as unaffordability has grown (Daley, et al., 2018). Within the asset economy, the privilege of the mortgage class continues to grow, sheltered by a political economic system that refuses to alienate it but instead perpetuates the financialisation of housing (O'Callaghan & McGuirk, 2021).

Incidentally, the corporatisation and neoliberalism of the public University system in Australia means higher education is not imagined as an avenue to self-knowledge or improvement and, relatedly, as a public good, but has been almost fully instrumentalised for job training (see Department of Education, Skills, and Employment, 2020). Like the majority of Australians, these job ready graduates inevitably go on to be consumers of productivist, industrial food (Lawrence, et al., 2013). In addition, as house prices rise as a result of a range of factors, many argue that higher education is a pathway to more lucrative job opportunities (e.g., Corliss, et al., 2020) and thus capable of servicing mortgage debt, even as the housing market in Australia is inaccessible to younger people without inheritance and those on low incomes (Christophers, 2018). As a result of the scale of debt commitments and the type of work and time involved in servicing those debts, and the popularity of farmer's markets notwithstanding, on the whole, the mortgage class has less and less time available for the kind of low-scale non-lucrative food production activities needed to transform the system.

It is in this context that making time to care differently for food is a holistic proposition that posits the real barriers to the transformation of industrial agriculture are the structural principles of the dominant model of social reproduction in Australia. In other words, learning to care differently is not simply about rethinking the relationship between learning and one's future job, rather it relates to all facets of life practice in relation to how we are supported by society to meet our basic needs. As such, we contend that to do the necessary work of interrupting the inertia of the industrial food system in settler colonial Australia¹, we must interrogate higher education and mortgage debt specifically because of the relationship between higher education, work, debt, and time use. This is because the industrial system is convenient and at least from a consumer point of view, time efficient; alternatives that actually recognise and address the problems of climate change and colonisation require more time (Pfeiffer, et al., 2017). In arguing for the prominence of mortgage debt, we deliberately leave to one side a range of known drivers of food practices such as marketing and advertising, brand-loyalty, supermarket layout, product placement, and built environment to name a few. Time, and, in particular, the need to rethink how we use it in the context of busy routines structured by clock time and paid work, is a key determinant of contemporary food practices that are currently, to a large extent, driven by a desire (or need) for convenience (e.g., Hinde, et al., 2009; Pfeiffer, et al., 2017). In the context of this paper, we propose that food practices are thus primarily functions of time rather than clever marketing or reflective of a particular ethos of consumption.

In addition to the vastness of food waste and ongoing global hunger, there are two urgent reasons why we need to transform the current food system. The first is environmental. The climate crisis demands we organise agriculture and food to take better account of the ecological base on which these systems ultimately depend. But this is a two-way street: the contribution of industrial agriculture to climate change and environmental harm more generally is without question and the impacts of climate change on agricultural systems are already being felt. As explained by Lawrence, et al. (2013), there are severe limitations to on-going agricultural productivity in Australia due to climate change-induced warmer and dried weather combined with loss of arable land due to soil degradation, and declining water for agriculture. They go on to outline that the industrial agri-food system has thus facilitated the eating 'well' of the mortgage class even as it has perpetuated a host of ecological harms, contributed to food waste, and perpetuated injustice such as over and undernourishment. As foreshadowed above, the 'thick legitimacy' of this system seems to create impossible barriers (political, economic, social, institutional, educational, financial) to change (Montenegro & Iles, 2016). At the level of the household, shopping for convenience at major supermarket chains (always stocked abundantly with first class, blemish free produce and products) contributes to the illusion that all is well. There is often little need (or time) for the mortgage class to interrogate the problems of the food system within day-to-day food practice.

As well as relying on an ecologically damaging agricultural system, the mortgage class is simultaneously ensuring the sustainability of the colonial project. That is, by seeding the aspiration for home ownership, we are also ensuring ongoing dispossession of Indigenous people and the perpetuation of the property system that overwrites Country. This is because private property, as a distinctively liberal socio-legal institution rooted in particular ideas of individual rights (Davies 2019) continues to marginalise and dispossess Indigenous peoples through on-going structures and process such as land-use planning, Torrens Titles legal frameworks, mapping, construction and mortgage debt (Crabtree, 2013; Keenan, 2014, 2019; Porter, 2017). While in the present, debates around mortgage debt and homeownership centre on affordability, history tells a story that links our backyards directly to the process of indigenous dispossession; mortgages are part of this system of ongoing dispossession. In Living on Stolen Land(2020), Ambelin Kwaymullina says:

and there is no place of innocence
for Settlers to stand
Not one location
where Settlers do not benefit
do not inherit the benefits
of the violent dispossession
of those who were here before.
You are living on stolen land.
What can you do about it?
(cited in Porter, et al., 2021: 112)

In Australia then, the land use planning system and Torrens titles laws, and therefore the buying and selling of property, are implicated in on-going Settler-colonial dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands. This is known though almost entirely denied and barely acknowledged by these structures (Porter, 2018). In addition, food politics, practices and practitioners in Australia remain deeply implicated in the ongoing dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples from their lands (Mayes, 2018). As such, in this context, embedding care within mundane food practices means we cannot escape thinking about dispossession, land and property in relation to food.

This first section has aimed to connect the time-poor nature of life in the mortgage class in contemporary Australia with dependency on the industrial food system. We then defined why this is an issue specifically because it presents a barrier to addressing climate change and coloniality. We now move to clarifying how education has a role in the time-poor mortgage class's food habits by examining the nexus between education, housing, work, and debt. We develop the idea that food practices that perpetuate the productivist agri-food system in settler colonial Australia are deeply connected to middle class debt (specifically housing and education) that structure time use.

 

The Mortgage-Education-Debt-Work Nexus

Property ownership in Australia has a cult status. It is a culture held in place by socio-cultural frameworks and generations of policy making that hold home as house ownership. Globally recognised property title law is an artifact of colonial South Australia (Keenan, 2019)². In addition, home is emotional: theoretically providing constancy, control, privacy, and a sense of permanence. Home is the place for day-to-day routines and rituals, especially involving young children. Although relationship structures are changing, home remains the site for the social reproduction of the nuclear, if not heterosexual, family. The fantasy of the private family structure can offer a sense of freedom from surveillance and can be a place to express your identity and share your intimate self with others. Alongside this romanticism around home, home ownership has been explicitly cultivated as a rite of passage, an achievement and source of pride, and an essential part of adult identity although this is changing in Australia as home ownership becomes increasingly unattainable for many people. All of this adds up to the Australian mortgage class generally not accepting long-term rental/lease-holds arrangements as 'home'.

The drive to home ownership in Australia has existed among Europeans since early colonisation but the Australian government has been an important driver of the dream of home ownership in Australia too. A range of policies were put in place post WWII to ensure the right to housing in Australia including publicly funded housing developments, Commonwealth grants to first home buyers, and Commonwealth low interest loans to owners' builders and home builders (Dufty-Jones, 2018). The idea behind the latter was that debt functioned as a social good and profits made by the state were reinvested into infrastructure and welfare. The result of these state actions was that home ownership rates in Australia soared post WWII. During the 1940s, 50s and 60s in Australia, the most prominent positive value of home ownership was security for the family, that is, a social investment that would secure housing for future generations that fostered a sense of stability, security, and well-being for the current and future family.

As a result of various economic policy shifts at the federal level, the accepted value of property ownership has shifted. Home for social security (use-value) has given way to house as liquid, global hyper-commoditised financial asset (exchange-value) (Adkins, et al., 2021). That is, housing has become a 'metaphorical repository within which to store and grow capital' (Rogers, et al., 2018: 434). Property's commoditisation and financialisation (and the concomitant rise of mortgage debt in Australia) came on the back of policies put in place by successive Federal Governments since the 1960s to liberalise and globalise financial and housing markets (Ferreira 2016). Such policies combined with those of the neoliberal welfare state that withdrew the promise of state-derived financial security (especially pensions and social housing) to position the owner-occupied house as a key component of welfare (Cook & Ruming 2021). In short, housing policy in Australia, across colonial history, is not politically neutral. Housing policy is directly and tacitly related to particular political agendas. But, as Adkins et al. argue, 'property inflation in large urban centres is the lynchpin of a new logic of inequality' (2020: 3) and this shift towards financialisation of housing marks a radical change in how we are able to meet our basic needs.

In the rush to secure necessary housing and, increasingly financial, futures and in the face of rising house prices, Australians are going into ever greater levels of debt. Australians are among the most indebted people on the planet with the average household debt to income ratio increasing at a faster rate and to a higher level than among households in most other countries (Kearns, et al., 2020). Among advanced economies, Australians have gone from having one of the lowest household debt-to-income ratios to one of the highest. The ratio of housing debt to disposable income rose from 31% in 1990 to 134% by 2007 (Davies, 2009) while the average loan size for owner-occupiers in Australia rose from $221,116 in February 2004 to $620,315 by January 2022 (ABS, 2022). In sum, fiscal and monetary policy manoeuvres have supported the growth of mortgage markets, shifted how the middle class in Australia relates to property and underpinned the rise of housing as an investment asset to fuel household wealth. As Crabtree (2016) explains, privately owned property is now entirely normalised as the only politically and socially sanctioned way to meet the basic need for shelter, and, combined with the financialisation of property, means any other system of housing is considered inferior, if at all.

Higher education is also implicated in indebtedness first through debt acquired in order to get a degree and second through funnelling graduates into home ownership through an education model that prioritises the production of professional, jobs-ready graduates. University students in Australia are incurring increasing levels of debt to attain a degree and there is a direct relationship between education-income-debt: the better educated you are, the more you earn; the more you earn, the more likely you are to hold debt and the more debt you are likely to hold (ABS, 2017). Higher education in Australia, as in other similar countries, operates under a neoliberal market logic as its primary informing framework and has done so since the 1980s (Etherington, 2016; Kanade & Curtis, 2019). The introduction of higher education student fees (initially 'contributions' but later 'loans') in 1989 are a feature of this logic, designed to shift the financial burden of higher education from the state to students (Jackson, 2003). Average levels of higher education debt have been increasing year-on-year (Ferguson, 2020). Under these logics, the state and universities have re-framed their students as ambitious user-pay consumers of higher education who accrue private benefit through their financial investment in their own human capital; entrepreneurs whose higher education will ensure their reduced burden on the welfare state throughout their life-course (Kanade & Curtis, 2019). While the Australian government loan scheme does not require immediate repayment of loans like in the United States, for example, this debt is part of banks' calculations of one's borrowing capacity and it would follow that if someone was in a financial position to apply for a mortgage, they would also be in a position to begin to repay their higher education debt.

In recent decades, as the public good character of Australian universities has become subject to the disciplines of neoliberal market logic (see Jayasuriya, 2015), universities have been increasingly obligated to ensure the student-consumer achieves their ambition of employment. This idea has been further entrenched in recent years by a narrative that sensationally makes problematic the ballooning or mountainous levels of 'doubtful student debt' that will never be repaid (e.g., see Norton & Cherastidtham, 2014). Under such pressure, Australian universities have adopted a whole range of strategies to better make-ready their students for employment in the market including strengthening industry connections, facilitating internships or placements, re-orienting to vocational programs and implementing work-integrated learning pedagogies (Connell, 2015; Croucher & Lacy, 2020; Grant-Smith & Feldman, 2020). The most recent efforts by the State to link university education with employment was the Jobs-Ready reform package (Australian Government, 2021).

The narrative of job-ready-graduates trades on the assumption that a university education will result in professional employment and a middle-class wage that allows entry to the housing market. In other words, much of the promise of higher education is the idea that higher education debt affords us higher incomes in our work lives and 'for the median person, there are-good monetary incentives to complete [bachelor] degrees' (Corliss, et al., 2020: 73[19]). However, due to rising house prices noted above and as noted by Adkins, et al. work alone no longer guarantees housing:

Average wage earners who, three or four decades ago, may have been able to enter the housing market by saving up for a deposit, are now increasingly reliant on intergenerational transfers to make their first leap into home ownership. To this we should add the fact that even the possibility of pursuing a tertiary education or the now compulsory unpaid internship very often requires monetary or in-kind support from parents in the form of rental assistance or rent-free shared housing ... Not only does housing wealth beget housing wealth, progressively narrowing the pool of those able to enter the housing market; it also increasingly determines one's educational opportunities and hence one's future earning potential and professional status. (2021: 561)

Debt (and in fact macro-economic stability at large) trades on an assumption of a particular kind of job, one that is well-paid, normally knowledge-based and above all, steady. What is surprising here that we foreshadowed above, is that there is strong evidence that participation in paid labour is not a desire for paid labour but an inability to fund mortgages without it. In other words, for a certain proportion of university graduates, it is housing that comes first. While many will recognise that a particular career can lead to a certain kind of professional life experience, underpinning at least some desire for work is home ownership. For example, in a study of labour market participation and housing prices, Atalay, et al. (2016) found that among mortgage holders who were older women or couples with young children, gains in household wealth that resulted from asset appreciation were used to fund time away from paid work to undertake unpaid work such as caring for their children and ageing parents or volunteering. In other words, where possible people traded employment for time. Bringing all of the above together, we can see the complex tangled relationship between mortgage, debt education, and work.

In thinking about making time to care differently for food then, the MDEW nexus is problematic because contemporary architectures of debt are primarily experienced in time. Debt's strength in orientating us in time is, according to Adkins, 'organized and defined by the rhythms and sensations of steadiness' (2017: 453), not least because, as Adkins says:

... the architectures of modern debt demand regular and continual repayments at fixed points in a calendar. Such architectures, moreover, bind the subject to what Guyer refers to as the 'calendrics of repayment', that is, to dated schedules of repayments. This binding in turn, affords a specific temporal rhythm to debt and I would add, to the indebted subject, namely one of steadiness. The nexus of repayments thus demands a steady and punctual subject, that is, a subject who can avoid (potentially violent) sanctions by satisfying the demands of repayment on time. (2017: 452)

Due to the urgency of the climate crisis and the radical marginalisation of Indigenous life and knowledge in this debt-driven structure, if we are to take seriously, and materially, the challenge of rethinking food practices, it seems that given house prices are not going to go down, we will, at least in the meantime, have to reimagine the relationship between education, work and therefore mortgage debt in order to make time for caring about food. Thinking about making time to care differently for food is especially important because care time-for anything, but in this case for growing, consuming, and composting food in anti-colonial and environmentally attuned ways-operates on an entirely different temporal scheme to that of the calendrics of debt, or the style of debt we are trained for through at the contemporary university.

 

The difficulty of making time to care differently for food

Although we've been talking about lots of topics from degrees to mortgages, this paper ultimately explores the need to make time to care differently for food. In this section we outline what making time to care differently means in theory and practice and specifically why, in the asset economies of the Global North, making time for this kind of work is structurally difficult or counter intuitive. To summarise, the reason we need to engage in this difficult and counter intuitive work in reforming the food system is to address ecological crisis and ongoing Indigenous dispossession. Although we do not propose a totalising or concrete vision for this new food system, we do contend that to address these related crises, food needs to play a different central role in all life and work in some way. Food is already central to our lives and work - we wake and eat, work and eat, gather and eat; we buy or rent houses and sit down and eat in them. All humans eat. We are animals who need to eat a lot to meet our basic energy needs, not to mention the demands for certain levels of productivity within the asset economy. Whatever it looks like, in any food system capable of addressing environmental and colonial harms we contend that the time spent on food-related activities needs to increase. Currently there are no financial incentives to do this. In addition to this specific claim, this pedagogical proposal is about how on the one hand we have the knowledge we need to move toward this different food system, but on the other, how a majority of Australians are in debt traps that make the realisation of this knowledge very difficult specifically because there is not enough time to care differently for food. We thus need to learn how to do it differently.

Given the weight of arguments for change in the food system and the lack of widespread action, in recent years some scholars have turned away from critique and towards speculative, adventurous, and hoped-for agri-futures where caring relations are a central feature (e.g., Carolan, 2013, 2016; Krzywoszynska, 2019; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017; Tsing, 2012). In particular, Puig de la Bellacasa's Matters of Care: Speculative Futures in More-Thian-Human Worlds (2017) extrapolates a theory of ideal forms of agri-food care in ecological terms by studying soil tending practices and permaculture communities. Puig's book in particular theorises a form of care for the human and non-human world that we use as a theoretical touchstone of this paper. This expansive notion of care has three dimensions: 'labour/work, affect/affections, ethics/politics' (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017: 5). It draws on the work of feminist theorist Joan Tronto who, according to Puig, keeps 'the tensions between care as maintenance doings and work, affective engagement, and ethico-political involvement' (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017: 6) alive in her theory. Specifically, Tronto's expansive definition of care is as 'a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our "world" so that we can live in it as well as possible' (2013: 19). In the book, Puig thoroughly theorises this in terms of human relations with more-than-human nature (like soil and food gardens) before examining a few key examples of what this looks like in practice.

The case studies in the book are exemplary of the ethic of care Puig theorises. They show people who have somehow learned how to resist the normative pace of work, life, and global agricultural markets to attend to, for example, soil microbes and fungi, in order to grow alternative agri-food worlds. For Puig de la Bellacasa, coming to more careful relations with food and all those who labour in its production is a matter of pace and proximity to the food system. By slowing down and making time to really see, for example, bacteria in the soil, by counting them, feeling them, learning to feed them well, existing relations are altered. They are emotionally affected, their material practices change, and the ethical structure of their actions shifts as well. We are not taking issue with Puig de la Bellacasa's examples as such, but the concerns of this scholarly pedagogical proposal pursue a set of questions that arguably precedes Puig de la Bellacasa's study. We are not asking: what does a more caring relationship with food look like? Rather, we take Puig de la Bellacasa's theorisation of care as a standpoint in this regard. So, instead, we are asking: given all we know about the MDEW nexus and how it structures time, we want to know: how does one make time to care differently for food? And with our pedagogical idea and proposed experiment we are asking: can disrupting education's role in thie MDEW pipeline open visible and viable new temporalities within whiichi we can care differently for food? Put another way, can our grassroots pedagogy engage the diverse mortgage class as a coherent political constituency through foregrounding the time-pressures of the MDEW nexus, and still cultivate new pathways to transforming the food system? In this vein, we are interested in Marie Puig de la Bellacasa's insistence that we attend to the material implications of care:

[i]t is important to stay close to the material signification of caring ... care can be easily idealized as a moral disposition, or turned into a fairly empty normative stance disconnected from its critical signification of a laborious and devalued material doing. (2011: 95)

More than theorising the ideal forms of care, attending to the material aspects of one's care practice is vital for ending regimes of externalisation and harm (to people and planet). When talking about making time to care differently for food then, we are not speaking about it in theory, we are referring materially to how care is involved in nourishing ourselves on a daily basis (from farm to table to waste chain) and how much time that takes, how we relate to the structures that cultivate food, how we think about food economies as related to our whole lives, and how much time we spend with our hands in the soil in close relationship with the food we eat. Far from it only being a humanist affair, Puig de la Bellacasa's multispecies theory of care takes us into more dynamic thinking about care holistically in terms of caring about and for the environment and expanding that care for food into practices that support ecological health, and an anti-colonial caring geared toward undoing the harms of settler colonial agri-food practices.

So, making time to care differently for food means somehow redirecting one's life toward the post-capitalist enterprise of creating an alternative food system. This does not necessarily mean everyone becomes a farmer, but it does mean thinking about how the land feeds us in relation to all that we do and making and doing new ways of food. While there is no singular utopia implied by the phrase 'to care differently for food', the alternative food system we refer to nonetheless needs to be addressing climate change (through non-extractive, regenerative agricultural practices that draw down carbon into the soil and do not create toxic run off that harms biodiversity) and is anti-colonial (that is, recognises that in a settler colonial state all food is grown on stolen land and finding ways of gradually undoing colonial harms through pay-the-rent schemes³, food justice programs, Indigenous agriculture or supporting land-back initiatives). In the syllabus below this is reflected in a range of ways that pertain to generating knowledge of the scale of the links between agriculture and environmental and colonial harm, but also seeding practices capable of actually addressing the problems.

In relation to the MDEW nexus, the practice of 'caring differently' concretely requires the reprioritisation of certain activities and the reorganisation of time. The desire and need for saving time drive us to convenience and easy food solutions which are experienced as crucial in modern life for preserving time. In an article entitled ' The "truth)" about convenience and climate chiange', Hinde, et al. argue that

The preservation of time has become a crucial life skill for the individual who wishes to successfully participate in, and conform to the demands of, modern life ... Convenience is more than a slogan that encourages consumers to buy a product. It is constituted in highly accepted ways of evaluating the world and a sense of what feels good, right and natural. (2009: 2)

In addition, the MDEW nexus itself is about the organisation of time, or what Adkins terms 'the nexus of repayment' which 'demands a subject who yields to and satisfies the temporal rhythms and schedules of the calculus of debt' (2017: 452). In contrast, in Matters of Care, for example, Puig de la Bellacasa explores 'soil time' and the cultivation of soil and building up of healthy soils which 'require(s) an intensification of involvement in making time for soil-specific temporalities' (2011: 172). In another context, Jonathan Beacham notes that using clover to remediate soil 'took time':

Although hard to accurately estimate - in a way growing food necessitated an ongoing, and forever experimental, cooperation with the more-than-human - the grower suggested that it took approximately 7 years to transform the site from when he first began. (2018: 541)

In addition to these scholarly observations about alternative food practices, the productivist food model is all about efficiencies in time and finance. These 'efficiencies' - often found through technologies such as combine harvesters and chemical inputs - are contributing to the collapse of not only soil health but entire ecosystems (FAO, 2021). In other words, currently, the care time needed to make time for alternative food systems is at odds with both what Puig de la Bellacasa calls the 'technoscientific futurity', and with what, following Guyer, Adkins (2017) calls 'calendrics of debt'. What this means in practice is that in the asset economies of the Global North, unless making time to care differently for food is somehow a lucrative employment opportunity (e.g., yields enough income to participate in the dominant economy) or being undertaken by someone already independently wealthy and free from debt (with available assets, cash resources or 'liquidity'), then centring food in this way will not be an option for most people. It is in this context that we float making time to care differently for food as a pedagogical proposal to intervene in these structures and practices that prevent us from unmaking the unsustainability of the industrial food system.

 

The Rationale for the Armidale Food School

The overarching rationale for AFSis twofold. The first reason is about reconnecting with care time. AFSseeks to teach students to think, make and divide up time differently in relation to all of the competing responsibilities in a life; it recognises the time-pressures or 'calendrics of debt' in the asset economy and at the same time seeks to encourage the re-valuation of care labour as it relates to food. In addition, AFS aims to cultivate pathways to engage in the material practices that lead towards the cultivation of new structures of care for food. The second motive is tied to the future of learning within the asset economy. As noted above, AFS is seeking a specific intervention in the logic of the asset economy at the most aspirational point of entry: the university. While Adkins, et al. (2021) argue that most wealth is garnered in the asset economy via intergenerational transfer, the liberal democratic ideal that underpins the design of the asset economy is that asset wealth is accessible to anyone. But this so-called democratisation of wealth via assets is actually more readily creating new forms of class stratification: 'a combination of property inflation, asset-based capital gains and wage moderation' result 'in a structural reconfiguration of patterns of inequality' (Adkins, et al., 2021: 467). So, wittingly or not, citizens of neoliberal democracies are increasingly subject to the calendrics of debt. In addition, the western University has come to precariously trade on the promise that both self-realisation and wealth accumulation is possible viathe working life promised in the wake of a university degree. In reality, the increasing costs of university education act as a pipeline, training people for jobs, on one hand, and also into the structures of debt that require life-long toil, on the other. As such, AFSis a pedagogical project that identifies the foundational role higher education plays in this system, how it reduces available time to engage in non-lucrative care-responsibilities and how we learn how to prioritise and organise time in relation to care as adults.

We see this project as sitting within the long tradition of radical pedagogy, with a non-hierarchical and materialist approach to the question of oppression. This might seem counter-intuitive given the focus on the mortgage class. The focus of radical pedagogy theory is on teaching for liberation from oppression, but usually framed in terms of older understandings of oppression. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire, for example, argues that the goal of a liberatory pedagogy is not for the 'the oppressed ... to become in turn oppressors of their oppressors but rather the restorers of the humanity for both' (1970: 44). What restoring humanity looks like is contextual. Here we see the stratifications of the asset economy as oppressive for all, but it also creates structural barriers to addressing climate change and coloniality leading to greater harm to the oppressed. Similarly, hooks (1994) explores the contours of 'liberatory pedagogy' in the essays of Teaching to Transgress to focus on how gender, race and a more classical conceptualisation of class in particular contour the experience of oppression and thus possible liberation. In many ways this involves not being part of the norm, not aspiring to simply be part of existing hierarchies but to teach towards greater inclusion and plurality. But in the asset economy the new configuration of class juggles around the logics of oppression in ways hitherto unaccounted for. Regardless, the focus on the mortgaged middle class, those who occupy the putative norm or ideal social form as target for a liberatory pedagogy needs comment.

When thinking about making time for food differently, we are explicitly referring to a postcapitalist practice (Gibson-Graham, 2006) geared towards taking time away from investing in the economy that delivers basic necessities (food, shelter) to meet our necessities in a way that does not grow wealth in any conventional sense. This is because, while many more than the 1% are benefiting financially from the asset economy (as Adkins, et al. (2020) make clear), all those invested in it are both participating in unsustainable forms of work that rely on the industrial agricultural system, which is itself a product of settler colonialism. Our focus on practice is informed by sustainability transitions research associated with the social theory of practice (Shove, et al., 2012). This theory holds that broader social transformation is possible through shifts to the everyday and habitual routines practiced at the level of the household. Such an approach fits with the post-capitalist approach of Gibson-Graham (2006) because both start from where we already are. In order to understand and then shift unsustainable food-based practices, practice theory asks us to shuttle hiorizontally between the various food-related practices that we habitually engage in - shopping, growing, cooking, eating, composting, washing-up - and vertically between the scales at which food habits are embedded and actioned, from the micro (e.g., plate), to the meso (e.g., supermarket), and macro (e.g., global trade). The pedagogical approach in AFS will interweave food and household-based habits across multiple scales and to the various related practices that shape such habits.

AFS will be encouraging people to question traditional forms of financial security in the context of a shrinking welfare state where social security is increasingly tied to one's capacity to pay off a mortgage, where property values are inflated, where wages have stagnated, and all retirement policies are based on a historical calculus of mortgage repayment that is unlikely for younger generations. We're talking, in other words, about encouraging the moderately wealthy and those who aspire to be moderately wealthy (middle class) to give something up for the chance of something better for themselves and also for others. This is a radical liberatory pedagogy because the current asset economy is increasingly exclusive, redrawing class lines and creating new forms of injustice at the same time as new forms of wealth. Put differently, for a runaway monopolistic logic not to dominate does not require better or more equitable pathways towards playing the game, but it calls for those already invested in the game to stop playing or start playing differently. As such, we seek students of any race, gender or sexual orientation who are indebted mortgagees and thus have no time to care differently for food. We also seek students who are locked out of the mortgage class, but suffering under rising rents who can no longer access the mortgage class because of a combination of wage stagnation, property inflation and rental rises. We seek those with the freedom of a small mortgage, no mortgage and/or large inheritance who are curious about how to make the world more just. We also realise that this will be a self-selecting group: students will have to be interested in thinking through how debt relates to the food system and learning new pathways toward a solution. What would it take to rearrange a life-within a househhold, within a community, within an economy-to make time to care differently for food? How does this differ depending on your class position within the asset economy? These are key questions asked at AFS.

It is within the particular context of the asset economy, emplaced in the specific location of Armidale, that AFS designs and situates its transformative pedagogy, building on the back of many extant projects that seek to transform both the university and the food system. In the first instance we learn from the intervention of Navdanya Bija Vidyapeeth, "School of the Seed" or Earth University (NBV). Started in 1995 by ecofeminist Vandana Shiva at her Navdanya organic farm in Dehradun, Uttarakhand India. Navdanya is primarily recognised as a non-government advocacy organisation for seed sovereignty and small-scale agriculture, against globalisation and agribusiness, in particular against organisations like Monsanto. That one wing of the seed school is a university, suggests that learning of a higher order needs to occur. NBV teaches a holistic series of courses each year. In 2021, this included courses on youth advocacy, agroecology and organic farming, wellbeing, and democratic politics; this is supported by a context of celebration and honouring of food stuffs in a series of biodiversity festivals centred on foodstuffs like wheat and mangoes. To frame such an initiative as a university, not just an NGO, charity or, indeed, farm, recognises the importance of higher education for effective widespread transformation in terms of the food system, but also the holistic nature of the problem of food - it requires a whole university, not just a new degree program - to teach an alternative way of imagining food.

In the context of settler colonial Australia, establishing AFS as a postcapitalist project seeks to occupy space for what la paperson (2017) terms the 'third university'. For la paperson (2017), the 'first' university 'accumulates', the second university 'critiques' and the third university 'strategises' ways to unmake the colonial world. To elaborate further, by this he means that it is a European institution that, in settler colonial states like the United States (his context) and Australia (ours), the 'first university' takes land, appropriates resources, establishes the authority of and disseminates colonial knowledges. Paradoxically, though, through the techniques of the 'second university'-the critical one-this hegemony can be challenged. For la paperson (2017), the second university is critical of the first but it only challenges hegemony in theory, not in practice: 'its hidden curriculum reflects the material conditions of higher education-fees, degrees, expertise, and the presumed emancipatory possibilities of the mind-and reinscribes academic accumulation'. In other words, critique alone does not fundamentally unsettle the first. But the second university is nonetheless a resource to generate and disseminate decolonising knowledge, even if through full-fee paying degrees. The third university, much like post-capitalist politics, focusses on small-scale distributed material practices. The partial and always incomplete move from the theory to praxis. Although focussed on the land-grant university structures in the United States, in A Third University is Possible, la paperson (2017) reflects on the university in relation to its capacity as a machine for accumulation via dispossession, and how the same machine can be involved in undoing those harms. This is especially relevant for thinking about pedagogy within institutions in a settler colonial nation like Australia, a material fact especially visible in a place known as the New England where the school will be situated:

Land accumulation as institutional capital is likely the defining trait of a competitive, modern-day research university. Land is not just an early feature in the establishment of universities. Land is a motor in the financing of universities, enabling many of them to grow despite economic crises (la paperson, 2017)

Universities are wealthy landholders and regularly use that equity to enable certain forms of economic and institutional growth, while selling land in crises. Despite the territorial holdings of the university, the particular principles of the university, such as they are, mean that the pedagogy can actually work against this tendency. Refusing a utopian vision of the third university, la paperson (2017) suggests something more banal and distributed: something more akin to a decolonial postcapitalist politics. These 'university projects' are guided by 'decolonial desires to implement change pragmatically' where agents 'appropriated university resources to synthesise a transformative, radical project.' He continues:

These formations may be personal, even solitary; they may be small working groups of like-minded university workers, research centers, degree programs, departments, even colleges ... The political work is to assemble our efforts with a decolonizing spirit and an explicit commitment to decolonization that can be the basis of transnational collaborations and transhistorical endurance.

The AFS is currently envisaged as an affordable university outside the accreditation and fee-payment structures of the Australian public university system. It corresponds with the tactics of the 'third university' because it draws on the labour time of the academic researchers for a pedagogical project outside the university; the aim of this pedagogical project is to learn to care differently about food, but this leads directly to the question of labour time, land use, wealth accumulation and dispossession. Thus, as a project designed to bring the food question together with the climate-colonial question, AFS can be understood as seeking to build material power and knowledge in the decolonising spirit of the third university.

Complementing an initiative like School of the Seed and the concept of the Third University is the minority world's tradition of the Free University. There is a worldwide movement towards free education that is an explicit response to the rising costs of education globally and the inability for education alone to ensure economic liberation. The models of free university build on experiments such as the short-lived Free University of New York (1965), instigated by professors who had lost their jobs protesting the Vietnam War or holding views anathema to US imperialism in the McCarthy Era. In the Australian context, the Melbourne Free University (MFU; established in 2010) and Brisbane Free University (BFU; established in 2012) are grass roots community initiatives led by academics (often those exhausted by precarious work) but which exist on platforms outside both the public/non-profit and for-profit education systems in the country. We initially conceptualised AFS as the Armidale Free Food School, but we were cautioned by the host organisation for the pilot, New England Regional Art Museum, that adding a price to the ticket creates a sense of commitment and that often even a minimal payment for events means better attendance than events that are free. So, while AFS is not a "free" school, the principles of the Free University are embedded in the AFS rationale, specifically as they are unhinged from the graduate attributes model of learning that prepares students for particular kinds of workplaces and job-ready skill profiling that is tied so directly to the asset economy. The Free University model is also evasive of the increasingly debt-driven funding models, and so although AFS will cost some money, the cost will be low and there will be a series of options for low-waged, concession card holders and under- and unemployed folks as well. This is because the proposition to get students out of the debt trap as they develop pathways towards their future lives is an important structural aspect of AFS given that small-scale food growing, and anticolonial work is not especially lucrative in the current economy.

In addition to these ways of conceptualising the university otherwise-as food-centric, decolonising, and free-there is a globally diverse alternative food movement specifically in developed countries that has grown up as a response to agriculture's role in ecological crisis. These projects include the rise of community supported agriculture (CSA) initiatives and other local small-scale food operations that are linked to specific social justice struggles. For example, Soul Fire Farm in the USA is a black and indigenous-led farming enterprise that seeks to support grassroots skill sharing and community building through food as an act of resistance to white supremacy. Or, Fresh Future Farm, North Charleston, South Carolina which is an urban agriculture project working in food deserts to create new pathways to fresh food for communities left behind by poor and unjust urban planning. In the Australian context, Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu shifted the contours of the debate by proposing that Indigenous land management was actually a form of highly sustainable agriculture. On a different track, the prominence of Permaculture is due to its development in Australia by Mollison and Holmgren (1978). High-profile and tech-savvy next generation "permies", at Milkwood Permaculture (Bradley & Ritar, 2018) and Good Life Permaculture (Moloney, 2021), for example, are disseminating the philosophy of growing widely through online resources and a range of courses (from the intensive Permaculture Design Certificate to smaller offerings around mushroom cultivation, gardening in rental properties and DIY gardening). The question of land tenure, highlighted by the turn in focus to permaculture activities in rented properties also has other related manifestations. In the USA again, a new partnership between the landless farmer co-operative Love is Love and conservation foundation grants is creating new opportunities for alternative food growing without the capital investment needed for the purchase or rental of land (Winfrey & Reynolds, cited in Zyman, 2021). In addition to all these developments there are farmer's markets, community gardens and the slow movement that constitute attempts to shift the food system towards a different model. AFSis nested within this movement, but as a university initiative also aims to teach the overarching problem or critique of the current system, alongside seeding practices that could make the system anew.

The city of Armidale, on Anaiwan Country in what is now known as New England is the specific trial site. Firstly, this is for pragmatic reasons: we are here. We have jobs at the university and both of us have moved into the mortgage class since arriving in Armidale. So, the issues of debt, time, education, and work are close to the bone. But there are other reasons that make this site a good point of origin. It is a small city - between 25 and 30 thousand people - making the challenges of urbanisation, population density and knowledge economy infrastructures present - but not at the scale of the contemporary metro- or megalopolis. It is also a university town, with an institution committed to training graduates to work in the regional and rural economies of the future, often with very little attention to how that work will materially address climate change and coloniality. It is also an agricultural area full of livestock; the land and soil in the Australian high country was already poor quality for agriculture, but the presence of cows and sheep since colonisation has degraded it further. Agriculturalists were the colonial pioneers in this region and responsible for the murder of Indigenous people at point of contact. As such, working towards decolonial and environmentally just futures in the area requires reckoning with these original harms in material ways. Finally, in the wake of COVID, with people fleeing the pressures of the city, house prices are rising, and it seems that soon it will be subjected to the same time-pressures as other places with over-inflated land values that make material care for land and waters financially challenging.

 

Syllabus and workshop plan

In this final section we present a syllabus for Armidale Food School. Like any curriculum this is a time-bound proposition that is responding to what needs to change now (in 2022) with the view to maintaining relevance as a curriculum only until such time as enough change has occurred to ensure its irrelevance. Our draft curriculum is tailored to those living and working on stolen Anaiwan country, but it could be displaced to other places - but place and the contested status of land and water will always be central to the curriculum because food always has a relationship with land and water. Any utopianism is tempered with pragmatism about the material and existential obstacles to radical transformation to the food system covered in section one.

The pedagogical approach of AFS is based on studio-based models of teaching. As Bosman, et al. (2012) explain, there is much to recommend studio-based learning which involves students working, often collaboratively, alongside educators to explore problems and solutions in reflective and reiterative ways. Studio-learning is hands-on with students as active participants engaged in solving a problem rather than passive recipients. Learning occurs through a community of practice that includes teachers, peers and external stakeholders with students asked to practically apply concepts to a real-world problem in a reflexive way that facilitates deep understanding. Importantly, studio learning offers an opportunity for learners to grow their self as they are challenged to take responsibility for the outcome of their learning, draw personal experiences into the learning process, work independently and assess their own learning. The grounded and applied nature of studio learning means theory and practice are integrated. The solution to the problem and thus outcomes of studio learning are not fixed or known at the outset which can be challenging for both students and educators whose imaginaries of education might be based in more fixed and hierarchical models of educator-as-expert.

We propose AFS as an eight-week long course. The central 'problem' students will explore is as follows: 'How do we make time to care differently about food in the context of debt time?' The course is structured around eight, two-hour long, face-to-face studio sessions each of which is themed around a discrete topic (see table 1). Studio sessions will involve a mix of traditional lectures, workshops, tutorials, practicals, and fieldtrips. Lectures will be short presentations by course designers and external stakeholders with a focus on interrogating mundane, taken-for granted or habitual food-based practices in respect to ideas around gardening, shopping for food, housing structures, land ownership and colonisation, free time, and domestic labour. In the first instance the funding for the teachers comes from the research salaries of the two co-creators (Hamilton and Larder) in the spirit of the Third University, drawing resources from the university for anti-colonial material practices outside the financial structure. For the pilot, leftover funds from another project (the Armidale Climate and Health Project, funded by an NSW Adapt Grant 2021) will be used to pay guest speakers for their time. The main assessment task will take the form of a learning journal which students will self-assess based on the criteria of time-on-task. Students will be given questions to reflect on each studio to structure their journal around.

 

Conclusion

This paper has presented the scholarly rationale for the Armidale Food School. We began by linking the relationship between debt, time, and food; then moved to deepen the understanding of the MDEW nexus as a structural barrier to making time for food; in turn we explored the way that new care practices for food need time and then situated this pedagogical proposal in a tradition of radical pedagogy aimed at learning towards liberation and social transformation. Given the counter-intuitive nature of the claim that we need to "learn how to make time" for particular mundane practices as they pertain to food, we needed to carefully justify why this is the case. The main reason we insist we need to learn to make time is because the income-debt ratios in Australia's asset economy are high; as such, it is becoming increasingly difficult to make time to engage in the kind of financially devalued but emergent food practices that are known solutions to environmental crisis and capable of fostering new anti-colonial relations with land as well. We position this project in the tradition of radical pedagogy because the school is geared towards environmental justice via change in social practice, not just to have students 'ready' to assimilate into the existing university-job-mortgage pipeline. If we are to champion slow acts of care for land and water as solutions to climate crisis and colonial harms in Australia, and if we are to repeatedly manifest projects that successfully cultivate healthier and more careful relations with the environment through new smaller scaled agricultural practices, we need to educate people on the real structural barriers to enacting these practices within the asset economy at the same time as providing ways of thinking about the economy otherwise.

Following this scholarly rational, the next steps for the project are to establish the school as a pedagogical research incubator where we can carefully study the effects of the proposed syllabus on individual practices, at home and at work, and at the same time explore the new economic practices and local food networks that may grow out of the school community. This next phase of the project is in line with emerging postcapitalist community action research that is exploring the potential for teaching small-scale local, grounded, and practical economic activity in a higher education setting in a time of environmental crisis.

 

Author Biographies

Jennifer Mae Hamilton lives and works on Anaiwan Country. Her research explores weather, housework and affect drawing on queer, feminist, and anti-colonial theory to foster change in material practices. She's a member of the Community Economies Research Network and Senior Lecturer in English at the University of New England.

Nicolette Larder lives and works on Anaiwan Country. Her research centres on alternative food networks with a particular interest in the grounded practices of growers and producers. She is a keen gardener, Council member of the Geographical Society of New South Wales and Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of New England.

 

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Submitted: 13 December 2021
Accepted: 14 April 2022

 

 

# Corresponding Author: jennifer.hamilton@une.edu.au
1 Settler colonialism is a form of colonial rule where the land was settled, and the previous society is sought to be replaced by the new one. We consciously refer to Australia as a settler-colonial place in order to highlight the contested nature of Agricultural land in present-day environmental struggles, following the work of Bruce Pascoe (2014) and Chris Mayes (2018).
2 As noted by Kennan: 'In 1858, colonist Robert Torrens developed a new system for the transfer of land in South Australia, where the land was understood by colonial powers as 'new' and without history. With the intention of making land a liquid asset, Torrens' system of title registration shifted the legal basis of title from a history of prior possession to a singular act of registration' (2019: 283).
3 "Pay-the-rent" is a concept whereby non-Indigenous folks in Australia give money to indigenous organisations as a form of reparation for colonial land theft. The organisations are decentralised, grassroots and often site-specific with a range of different models to devolve funding from the schemes to community.