Cultivating social change: the processual analysis of community agriculture as repertoire of collective action. A participatory research co-created with Italian farmers’ communities.

The research investigates whether and how different types of community agriculture work as a repertoire of collective action. Community agriculture describes an array of food commoning practices thereby local communities redesign their food systems on shared cultivated fields. Food autonomy has historically represented a popular strategy of resistance against the privatization of reproduction employed as a tool of social control. Yet, its social and political intakes remain contested. The present analysis is implemented through a processual analytical framework that investigates how agency is articulated across the dimensions of time, space, and relations. The methodology is inspired by the epistemologies and ethics of participatory research; the qualitative design includes participant observation, life history interviews and workshops such as mind maps, timelines, Venn’s diagrams, moving debates, and impact analyses. Within the Italian landscape of Community Food Networks, three Italian communities participated in the co-creation of data: Arvaia in Bologna, Bread&Roses in Bari, and Mondeggi in Firenze. Situated along a continuum from less to more intense nuances of food commoning, each community represents a specific approach to community agriculture as repertoire of collective action. Through these experiences, the research explains how the repertoire works differently depending on various political approaches that merge elements of integration, contentiousness and subtraction from the structural context of local communities.