Debates on agriculture and food increasingly highlight the depoliticising effects of neoliberal governance, technocratic regulation, and consumer-oriented solutions. While a growing literature has examined collective action dynamics within grassroots agrifood initiatives, less attention has been focused on the processes through which politicisation may emerge. The article addresses this gap by examining how political meanings are constructed through collective processes of meaning-making in community agriculture. Building on a processual conception of the political as an ontologically present dimension of social relations, the study proposes a semiotic approach to analyse how practices of politicisation and depoliticisation unfold within everyday communication. Methodologically, the article combines political semiotics with participatory mind-mapping workshops co-created with three community agriculture initiatives in Italy. The analysis draws on linguistic functions to trace how different communicative configurations support or constrain the emergence of political meanings. The findings show that politicisation is encouraged by communicative environments where relational interaction, contextual interpretation, symbolic expression, and orientations toward collective action reinforce one another. Depoliticising tendencies, by contrast, tend to emerge when these linguistic functions become disconnected, for instance when discourse remains confined to technical descriptions, individualized narratives, or symbolic imagery without grounding in shared interpretations of socio-economic contexts. By foregrounding the communicative infrastructures through which meanings are negotiated, the article contributes to debates on Community Food Networks and environmental post-politics. More broadly, it advances a methodological framework for observing processes of politicisation empirically through the analysis of collective meaning-making practices.
Tracing politicisation in community agriculture: A semiotic analysis of participatory mind maps
Aguiari, Irina
In corso di stampa
Abstract
Debates on agriculture and food increasingly highlight the depoliticising effects of neoliberal governance, technocratic regulation, and consumer-oriented solutions. While a growing literature has examined collective action dynamics within grassroots agrifood initiatives, less attention has been focused on the processes through which politicisation may emerge. The article addresses this gap by examining how political meanings are constructed through collective processes of meaning-making in community agriculture. Building on a processual conception of the political as an ontologically present dimension of social relations, the study proposes a semiotic approach to analyse how practices of politicisation and depoliticisation unfold within everyday communication. Methodologically, the article combines political semiotics with participatory mind-mapping workshops co-created with three community agriculture initiatives in Italy. The analysis draws on linguistic functions to trace how different communicative configurations support or constrain the emergence of political meanings. The findings show that politicisation is encouraged by communicative environments where relational interaction, contextual interpretation, symbolic expression, and orientations toward collective action reinforce one another. Depoliticising tendencies, by contrast, tend to emerge when these linguistic functions become disconnected, for instance when discourse remains confined to technical descriptions, individualized narratives, or symbolic imagery without grounding in shared interpretations of socio-economic contexts. By foregrounding the communicative infrastructures through which meanings are negotiated, the article contributes to debates on Community Food Networks and environmental post-politics. More broadly, it advances a methodological framework for observing processes of politicisation empirically through the analysis of collective meaning-making practices.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
