The Covid-19 pandemic has been described by geographers as a time of 'pause' and 'reflection' full of possibility for more sustainable relationships to non-human nature. This has been conceptualised as the 'Anthropause' during which an 'anthropause environmentalism' (re)configured human-nature relationships. Using a critical feminist lens, we challenge the notion of a 'paused' pandemic society by analysing the domestic and community foodwork of minority women in Manchester, England living in states of precarity and the volunteers whose improvised solidarities alleviated the burdens of hunger and isolation faced by many. We propose the notion of the 'Anthro-No-Pause' to suggest there was no pause dedicated to more and different connections to non-human nature. Instead, there was a continuing and/or deepening of physical, material and emotional 'vernacular labours' during pandemic lockdown periods. These labours and burdens during Covid-19 must foreground any geographical theorising of the uneven geographical, community and personal experiences of the pandemic.

Reducing enteric methane production from ruminant livestock has been positioned as a key intervention to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. Bovaer©, a feed additive purported to reduce enteric methane emissions in dairy cows by nearly a third, has received regulatory authorization in many countries. However, there is a dearth of evidence on the consumer’s response to the use of such products. In the three weeks after 27 November 2024, there was a significant increase in media communications associated with the use of Bovaer© in Europe, and especially the United Kingdom (UK). This structured review of academic and gray literature and an iterative non-systematic survey of media discourse online explored and characterized the narratives that emerged in this three-week period of intense activity in both social media and mainstream media communications in order to critique the narratives and grammars within the public response and the implications for policymakers, industry and academia. The main narrative that emerged reflected the science-consumer tensions associated with the use of Bovaer© and the four sub-narratives shaping it (mainstream media influence and narrative framing, distrust in science and lack of relatability, conspiracy theories and fear-based narratives, consumer buycotts and market responses). Organizations adopting technological solutions to address ‘wicked’ societal problems need to understand the factors that trigger, amplify and attenuate social concern as expressed in mainstream and social media and need to adopt appropriate communication and dissemination activities to reduce the circulation of mis-dis-mal-information and promote information that is appropriate for multiple audiences and levels of understanding.

This study explores COVID-19 communications disseminated by the top 100 most followed Twitter profiles—what we call the Twitter influencing elite. Focusing on a critical period from January to July 2020, we conducted a quantitative and qualitative analysis of 6,602 tweets about COVID-19 produced by these Covid Influencers. The findings reveal that approximately two-thirds of the COVID-19 tweets in our sample originated from established global media organizations. While these sources were prominent, they were not the “loudest” in terms of engagement and virality. That belonged to powerful politicians like Trump and Obama, popular singers such as Harry Styles and Taylor Swift, and business personalities like Elon Musk. What is more, our qualitative analysis highlights how the affordances of the digital space and the context of the pandemic were leveraged by these influential Twitter users to advance their own agendas. For instance, some blended health information and caring narratives with promotional appeals, while others, such as Elon Musk and Donald Trump, engaged in political agitation and/or anti-care discourses creating a staccato of conflicting messaging and mis/dis-information. These findings demonstrate that the Twitter space is as political and politicized as it is commercial and commercialized. We conclude that digital influencers and celebrities cannot just simply be used to produce communications during times of crisis as many across the study of health and medical communication have argued. The involvement by digital influencers and celebrities—much like the Covid Influencers we examined here—in spreading information must be critically scrutinized, considering the potential for mixed motives, agendas, and real-world outcomes.

BackgroundThe environmental and social impacts of cultured meat, and its economic viability, are contingent on its implications for food production and for agriculture. However, the implications of cultured meat production for farmers have not yet been thoroughly investigated and are poorly understood. The aim of this research was to engage with the farming sector in critically assessing cultured meat as a technology which could profoundly affect future farm livelihoods, land use, rural and farming communities and agricultural value chains. Ensuring farmers’ voices, and potential ‘counter-narratives’ inform the development of cultured meat is not only inclusive, but could identify unexpected impacts of this emerging technology and contribute to the framing of the social license of the industry developing them.MethodsSix focus groups were undertaken with 75 UK farmers from a variety of farming sectors and regions. Questions focused on what the term ‘cultured meat’ means to farmers, the potential impacts of cultured meat, and potential business scenarios arising for farmers. All meetings were recorded, transcribed, and thematically analyzed.Results and discussionFarmers expressed complex and considered reflections on cultured meat, raising several perceived opportunities and risks associated with the themes of ‘ethics and affective’ narratives, ‘environment-based’ narratives, and ‘socio-economic’ narratives. Aspects of foci of power, food system control and transparency associated with cultured meat emerged from the conversations, as well as cultured meat’s potential impacts on the environment and on jobs, farming/rural communities and connecting with the land.ConclusionGlobally, meat production underpins the livelihoods of many rural communities, so a transition to cultured meat is likely to have deep-seated ethical, environmental, and socio-economic impacts. Within the discourse on cultured meat the voices of farmers are often lost. While not claiming to be representative of all UK farming, this study engaged UK farmer perspectives as a way of starting the substantive process of greater stakeholder inclusion in cultured meat innovation pathways, and which should underpin responsible technology transitions in agriculture.

A geographical perspective is crucial to understanding sustainability transitions and transformation, but previous research on place framing in sustainability transitions and transformation has had a marked focus on the politics of the future and its performativity in the present. This paper analyzes place-framing in sustainability transitions and transformation by examining how the conflicting collective memories of a place and the framings of the future of this place interact and lead to the justification of particular forms of socio-material development, land use and sustainability of the peri-urban spaces of the city of Sogamoso, Colombia. Based on 38 semi-structured interviews, we identify three distinct assemblages of future visions, collective memories and place frames, which we call urban development, recovering tradition, and cultural revitalization. The analysis shows that place framing is an exercise through which collective memories and future visions are connected and co-constituted in a spatio-temporal 'dialogue': collective memories, future visions and place frames are processes of social construction activated in the attempt to shape or contest sustainability transitions and transformation. We contend that the existence and mobilization of collective memories—and their critical influence on future visions—are a core aspect of the politics of place framing fundamental to the socio-material processes of sustainability transitions and transformation. Furthermore, a politics of place-making in sustainability transitions and transformation involves acknowledging and negotiating collective memories of the past as much as future visions. This suggests ways to critically counterbalance the marked future orientation taken in recent years by sustainability science and transition studies.

Comida e cultura digital estão mutuamente implicadas nos processos contemporâneos da produção de conhecimento e da contestação de poder ao redor do mundo. Nossa introdução e os artigos nesta edição especial do European Journal of Cultural Studies buscam traçar distinções, paralelos e sobreposições entre a comida e o digital para oferecer insights críticos sobre as capacidades, paradoxos e impactos da cultura alimentar digital sobre a vida cotidiana. Fazemos uma série de questões fundamentalmente focadas em questões de poder que sinalizam uma questão crucial para a (re)produção e circulação de desigualdade na ligação entre a comida e o digital. Para nós e para os autores aqui, Estudos Culturais é um solo particularmente fértil para se analisar a comida digital precisamente devido ao compromisso da disciplina em fazer a crítica do poder e da desigualdade e sua subsequente capacidade para esclarecer a política da comida digital cotidiana e seus impactos sociais, culturais e éticos. Este artigo apresenta e destaca questões essenciais – e introduz conceitos relacionados e debates teóricos – que guiam a agenda desta pesquisa. Além disso, abordamos as formas como os artigos desta edição se conectam à cultura alimentar digital e ao poder após a COVID-19. Concluímos com o sumário dos artigos desta edição e suas contribuições para a pesquisa sobre cultura alimentar digital e estudos culturais de forma mais ampla.

ABSTRACTThroughout the world, 785 million people lack a basic drinking‐water service and at least 2 billion people consume contaminated drinking water. At the same time, numerous global water charities fronted by ‘caring’, politicized celebrity figures — dubbed the ‘high priests’ of global development by the authors of this article — have sought to ‘solve’ inequalities in access to clean water through market‐based solutions and charity donations. This article engages with the fields of critical social theory, political theology, political ecology and celebrity studies to analyse the interrelationship between capitalism and religion, to interrogate the drivers of international development, and to historically situate the work of celebrity‐led water charities and the growing role of these ‘high priests’. It takes the case of Matt Damon's Water.org to examine the increasingly religious nature of these neoliberalized charity processes, and outlines the main elements of what the authors term a contemporary political economy of sacrifice. They argue that this results in charities that, rather than reducing inequalities, actually reproduce, normalize and legitimize the very system and exploitative relations that are responsible for these inequalities and environmental problems in the first place, while scattered and localized fixes sustain the illusion that things are getting better.

Jason Moore’s theory of the commodity frontier serves as a useful framework for demonstrating the social-ecological upheaval that occurs in the “frontier” spaces to which capitalism must expand in search of uncommodified, cheap nature. Work to date however has failed to consider how the impacts of frontier expansion interact with climate change despite the two phenomena being closely linked in both causes and effects, and largely impacting most severely upon rural communities in the Global South. We seek to address this gap with a focus on the coastal commodity frontier: social-ecological systems within which marine and terrestrial frontier expansion can occur concurrently, while being impacted by climatic change. The research was conducted using an ethnographic, casestudy approach, centred on an eight-month research visit to Aboadze, a small-scale marine fishing community in the Western Region of Ghana. This community is subject to terrestrial frontier expansion in the form of a thermal power station, marine frontier expansion in the form of industrial overfishing, and is also exposed to the impacts of climate change. We find, through a double exposure vulnerability framework, that frontier expansion and climatic change interact to exacerbate food, water, and livelihood insecurities in the case-study community, while simultaneously reducing the community’s capacity to adapt to its changing environment and perpetuating harmful global changes through feedback exposures. This research makes an important conceptual contribution by galvanizing a conversation between two thus far disparate fields and invites further research to provide more nuanced analyses of the intersectional vulnerabilities impacting coastal communities.

In this fully updated and revised chapter, we survey how legacy and social media representational practices shape the cultural politics of knowledge, information and news coverage on climate change around the world. Mass media stitch together formal science and policy with everyday activities in the public sphere, yet expressions vary across cultures and social, environmental, economic and political contexts. Since 2015 and the publication of the first edition of this Handbook, coverage of climate change around the world—both in terms of frequency and content—has changed substantially. To assess these changes, we focus on the shifting production of climate change news across both newspaper coverage and social media to assess how these processes broadly influence awareness and engagement. New data on these changes in coverage from 2014 to 2021 are presented and analyzed to bring attention to how power flows through shared as well as different cultures, politics and societies. In particular, we explore how legacy and social media representations of climate change construct knowledge, norms and conventions about variegated dimensions of climate change through novel coverage of, for example, the Trump presidency, extreme weather events, climate change as an “intersectional” story and the “Greta Thunberg Effect” in the rise of #climatenews in digital spaces. In this new and updated chapter, we consider how interactions between science, media, policy, digital technology and the public have contributed to perceptions, misleading debates, priorities and understandings concerning climate change that, in turn, guide efforts seeking to enlarge rather than constrict the spectrum of possibility for responses to climate challenges at multiple scales. Such work builds on and catalyzes ongoing investigations into how environment and communication dynamically influence perceptions, attitudes, intentions, decision-making and management of risk in non-linear, complex ways in a climate-changed world.

What is the future of food in light of growing threats from the climate emergency and natural resource depletion, as well as economic and social inequality? This textbook engages with this question, and considers the complex relationships between food, place, and space, providing students with an introduction to the contemporary and future geographies of food and the powerful role that food plays in our everyday lives. Geographies of Food explores contemporary food issues and crises in all their dimensions, as well as the many solutions currently being proposed. Drawing on global case studies from the Majority and Minority Worlds, it analyses the complex relationships operating between people and processes at a range of geographical scales, from the shopping decisions of consumers in a British or US supermarket, to food insecurity in Sub-Saharan Africa, to the high-level political negotiations at the World Trade Organization and the strategies of giant American and European agri-businesses whose activities span several continents. With over 60 color images and a range of lively pedagogical features, Geographies of Food is essential reading for undergraduates studying food and geography.

In this paper we analyse ongoing attempts to mitigate cattle methane emissions through the lens of biopower. Drawing on IPCC and FAO reports as well as the scientific literature, we detail how the problem of cattle methane has been made visible and the subsequent efforts that have emerged to govern human and non-human life from molecular to global scales. Such efforts have been thwarted by the liveliness of cattle, farmers and consumers. Rather than mitigating emissions, production-oriented cattle methane research has assisted the expansion of cattle emissions by promising an immanent solution that is never realised. More recent consumption-oriented strategies are overdue but limited by a hesitancy to fully address the political problems associated with transitioning away from beef and dairy. More direct and transparent responses are needed to confront the contradictions between the expansion of animal agriculture and global efforts to mitigate climate change in fair and just ways.

Food and digital culture are mutually implicated in contemporary processes of knowledge production and power contestation around the world. Our introduction and the papers in this special issue of the European Journal of Cultural Studies seek to draw out the distinctions, parallels and overlaps across food and the digital to offer critical insights into digital food culture's capacities, paradoxes and impacts on everyday life. We ask a series of questions fundamentally focused on issues of power that signal a critical concern for the (re)production and circulation of inequality within the food and digital nexus. For us and the authors here, Cultural Studies is particularly fertile ground from which to analyse digital food culture precisely because of the discipline's commitment to critiquing power and inequality and its subsequent capacity to illuminate everyday digital food politics and their social, cultural and ethical impacts. This article presents and highlights key questions-and introduces related concepts and theoretical debates-that drive this research agenda. In addition, we address the ways the issue's papers connect to digital food culture and power after COVID-19. We conclude with a summary of the articles in the issue and their contributions to digital food culture research and cultural studies more broadly.

Celebrity advocacy for environmental causes has grown dramatically in recent decades. An examination of this expansion and the rise of causes such as climate change reveals the shifting politics and organization of advocacy. We address these changes to the construction and interpretation of celebrity advocacy and detail how they have produced a rich variety of environmental celebrity advocates. We also account for differences between legacy (e.g., radio, TV, newspapers) and online celebrities and their practices (e.g., hashtag publics, brandjacking, online communities). Environmental celebrity advocates’ performances can be divided into nine tropes, each characterized in part by the particular varieties of environmentalism that they promote. We present the tropes and discuss their five cross-cutting themes. We conclude with a set of questions for future research on celebrity environmentalism.

This research adopts Jason Moore's concept of the commodity frontier, which portrays the socio-ecological impacts of capitalist expansion, to analyze the spread of Independent Power Provision in Sub-Saharan Africa. This form of power provision has thus far been under-theorized, especially its impacts on local communities, which must be addressed considering its contemporary popularity in the region. The article uses the concept of 'infrastructural violence' as an analytical lens, drawing upon its language and theories that describe the ways in which physical infrastructures often deemed benign can inflict violence on specific regions and social groups. Using a case study of the Takoradi Thermal Power Station in the Western Region of Ghana, the ethnographic research depicts the subtle yet highly deleterious forms of violence that occur within Aboadze, the small-scale fishing community the power station is embedded in, reducing access to vital resources including food, water and land, as well as the various exclusions that impact the livelihoods of a community already suffering from marginalization and poverty.

This chapter assesses selected exclusionary practices—with reference to the production spaces of Costa Rica and Mexico and the consumption spaces of Malaysia— to highlight some ethical ambiguities and limits to sustainable consumption, market-led sustainability, and, more broadly, eco-chic. It outlines what we see as the spaces of intention in the complicated and ambiguous arenas where the material and discursive connections between and among eco-chic consumers and producers are constructed and made real. The chapter then considers the productionist exclusionary practices from research done in Costa Rica and Mexico and consumerist exclusionary practices from Malaysia. The sustainable consumption sector is predicated on the production of spaces of intentions that give it meaning and purpose. One key factor that renders our understanding of spaces of intention more complex is the exclusionary practices of knowledge and taste that underpin them yet which sit uncomfortably with lofty network aims.

As we write this, the UK is slowly emerging from its period of self-imposed lockdown restrictions due to the Covid-19 pandemic and facing the virus's lasting impacts upon society at every scale imaginable.Felt acutely in the upending of the everyday practices that define our daily routines and engagements with others, there have been monumental, far-reaching changes to the many everyday actions we, in the Minority World, take for granted.These have included a complete halt for many people of getting in the car for work or on a plane to go on holiday, to immense disruptions to the ways we do our jobs, acquire food and engage in the social relations that allow us to be family members, citizens, friends and neighbours.The pandemic shined a harsh light on these practicesfor example, who can continue to work from home and who cannot, who can access and afford food delivery and who cannot-and the very real race, class and gender inequalities embedded in the ability and ways these daily routines are performed.

Drawing on recent debates around food, space and digital media, this paper introduces and develops the concepts of the digital foodscape and 'good' food grammars. Through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of digital platforms, discourses and personas, we investigate the ways a key set of digital food influencers (DFIs) construct, curate and share the meanings of good food. We first explore who these influencers are, describe what platforms they inhabit, how the variable social media affordances work through these platforms and the notions of good food they construct. We then focus specifically on DFIs' communicative practices on Twitter to analyse the core discourses DFIs produce and those that are taken up by audiences through re-tweets and likes as well as the re-tweeted tweets of DFIs. Overall, our findings suggest that first, good food grammars are being constructed by rule setters beyond the already well-established food personalities and celebrity chefs of the UK's foodscape. Yet, these grammars also re-inscribe a form of white, hetero-normative middle- and upper- class privilege that produces particular grammars of good food. Second, different social media and digital platforms provide space for diverse good food grammars given their variable affordances. Twitter, in particular, is the place where the grammars of DFIs take on non-food themes such as self-empowerment, inspiration, charity campaigning and awareness raising. Third, the notions of good food in DFI grammars revolve around a range of constructions, with the most elevated related to 'clean' eating and/or 'clean' lifestyles that combined healthy, 'free from' diets with fitness regimes and expand DFI grammars - and ultimately their brands - into a more holistic lifestyle brand. This paper's initial empirical and conceptual foray into digital foodscapes and DFIs opens up space for further research on food and digital media within Geography and beyond.

This chapter assesses the dynamic, multi-directional communication processes between the media, science, policy makers and publics, with a particular emphasis on climate change. The authors stress the need to consider shifting communication modes, with the decline in specialised environment reporting in traditional mass media outlets and the rise in digital and social media. They examine how these shifts affect the quality and quantity of coverage or public awareness and engagement and influence the distribution and power of 'claims makers', including the attribution of expertise. When it comes to the connections between media communication and environmental policy outcomes, research shows that 'more' coverage can boost the saliency of issues but that the form and style of coverage affects beliefs about the efficacy of action.