Charlie Spring | University of Calgary (original) (raw)
Papers by Charlie Spring
The Sociological Review, Aug 1, 2015
produced by witch hunts, arguing instead that prosecutors had good reason to investigate and brin... more produced by witch hunts, arguing instead that prosecutors had good reason to investigate and bring charges. Finally, Part Three tracks the legacy of the witch hunt narrative to recent developments including the sexual abuse scandal within the Catholic Church. The book is a work of significant scope and depth. It demonstrates empirical finesse and an obsessive attention to detail. Yet, this is also the Achilles heel of the work. The detail which so grips the book, does not provide in and of itself much light for the reader other than to defend the book’s overarching assertions. The book struggles to situate these meticulous findings within a broader critical context which could allow all the effort to be still more illuminatory. There is, for example, little exploration as to how and why this collation of abuse stories came to be constructed as they did. For example, Cheit does not place the witch hunt narrative within works of critical childhood scholars who consider the rise of risk anxiety about children and childhood during this period as indicative of broader social malaise about the collapse of family, gender norms, and cultural ties (Jackson and Scott, 1999). Indeed, reading the book now, at a time where child sexual abuses cases have a very high media profile, where the reporting is indicative of fears of the foreigner, the groomer, and the stranger (Cockbain, 2006) such an oversight is striking. Nor does the book explore how the witch hunt narrative works – who is complicit in the production of this phenomenon, how does information become sensation and how have child abuse stories shifted from the ‘crime story’ genre into one of their own (Hall et al, 2002). This is the main weakness of the book; the detailed empirical work is somewhat sublimated by a lack of interrogation about the emergence and power of the ‘witch hunt narrative’ as a specific and contextualised social phenomenon.
Sustainability, 2019
Global food insecurity levels remain stubbornly high. One of the surest ways to grasp the scale a... more Global food insecurity levels remain stubbornly high. One of the surest ways to grasp the scale and consequence of global inequality is through a food systems lens. In a predominantly urban world, urban food systems present a useful lens to engage a wide variety of urban (and global) challenges—so called ‘wicked problems.’ This paper describes a collaborative research project between four urban food system research units, two European and two African. The project purpose was to seek out solutions to what lay between, across and within the different approaches applied in the understanding of each city’s food system challenges. Contextual differences and immediate (perceived) needs resulted in very different views on the nature of the challenge and the solutions required. Value positions of individuals and their disciplinary “enclaves” presented further boundaries. The paper argues that finding consensus provides false solutions. Rather the identification of novel approaches to such w...
Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe - HAL - Université Paris Descartes, Nov 4, 2021
The right of Christian Reynolds, Tammara Soma, Charlotte Spring, and Jordon Lazell to be identifi... more The right of Christian Reynolds, Tammara Soma, Charlotte Spring, and Jordon Lazell to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Food Ethics, 2022
COVID-19 caused levels of household food insecurity to spike, but the precarity of so many people... more COVID-19 caused levels of household food insecurity to spike, but the precarity of so many people in wealthy countries is an outgrowth of decades of eroding public provisions and labour protections that once protected people from hunger, setting the stage for the virus’ unevenly-distributed harms. The prominence of corporate-sponsored foodbanking as a containment response to pandemic-aggravated food insecurity follows decades of replacing rights with charity. We review structural drivers of charity’s growth to prominence as a hunger solution in North America, and of its spread to countries including the UK. By highlighting pre-pandemic pressures shaping foodbanking, including charities’ efforts to retool themselves as health providers, we ask whether anti-hunger efforts during the pandemic serve to contain ongoing socioeconomic crises and the unjust living conditions they cause, or contest them through transformative pathways to a just food system. We suggest that pandemic-driven ph...
Food Ethics, 2022
COVID-19 caused levels of household food insecurity to spike, but the precarity of so many people... more COVID-19 caused levels of household food insecurity to spike, but the precarity of so many people in wealthy countries is an outgrowth of decades of eroding public provisions and labour protections that once protected people from hunger, setting the stage for the virus' unevenly-distributed harms. The prominence of corporate-sponsored foodbanking as a containment response to pandemic-aggravated food insecurity follows decades of replacing rights with charity. We review structural drivers of charity's growth to prominence as a hunger solution in North America, and of its spread to countries including the UK. By highlighting pre-pandemic pressures shaping foodbanking, including charities' efforts to retool themselves as health providers, we ask whether anti-hunger efforts during the pandemic serve to contain ongoing socioeconomic crises and the unjust living conditions they cause, or contest them through transformative pathways to a just food system. We suggest that pandemic-driven philanthropic and state funding flows have bolstered foodbanking and the food system logics that support it. By contextualising the complex and variegated politics of foodbanking in broader movements, from community food security to food sovereignty, we reframe simplistic narratives of charity and highlight the need for justice-oriented structural changes in wealth redistribution and food system organisation if we are to prevent the kinds of emergency-within-emergency that we witnessed as COVID-19 revealed the proximity of many to hunger.
The Sociological Review, 2015
Policy Futures in Education, Jan 3, 2019
CLoK Central Lancashire online Knowledge www.clok.uclan.ac.uk Sites of learning: exploring politi... more CLoK Central Lancashire online Knowledge www.clok.uclan.ac.uk Sites of learning: exploring political ecologies and visceral pedagogies of surplus food redistribution in the UK
Books by Charlie Spring
Researching Poverty and Austerity: Theoretical Approaches, Methodologies and Policy Applications, 2023
Research observed how food providers in the United States and Canada have made changes during the... more Research observed how food providers in the United States and Canada have made changes during the decades of neoliberal policymaking that have seen foodbanking expand across North America and beyond. These changes, in part, reflect responses to critiques of foodbanking as an inadequate solution to food insecurity. Food charities have variously attempted to improve provision through healthier procurement, choice-based distribution models, diversified programming, and advocacy for policy solutions. Better foodbanking, however, does not negate the influence of corporate donors on food charities’ capacity to foster hunger-preventative change, such as the employment practices of those same donors. Meanwhile, grassroots organisers have pushed for systemic solutions to food insecurity and food waste, whether disillusioned volunteers or mutual aid providers. These often operate with far fewer resources than the corporate donors, government agencies and philanthropists shaping foodbanking trajectories. Given the barriers to truly doing themselves out of a job, the chapter asks how far such changes address problems of institutionalised emergency food redistribution as outlined by Poppendieck’s Sweet Charity (1998), and what lessons these might yield for UK practitioners and decision-makers.
The Sociological Review, Aug 1, 2015
produced by witch hunts, arguing instead that prosecutors had good reason to investigate and brin... more produced by witch hunts, arguing instead that prosecutors had good reason to investigate and bring charges. Finally, Part Three tracks the legacy of the witch hunt narrative to recent developments including the sexual abuse scandal within the Catholic Church. The book is a work of significant scope and depth. It demonstrates empirical finesse and an obsessive attention to detail. Yet, this is also the Achilles heel of the work. The detail which so grips the book, does not provide in and of itself much light for the reader other than to defend the book’s overarching assertions. The book struggles to situate these meticulous findings within a broader critical context which could allow all the effort to be still more illuminatory. There is, for example, little exploration as to how and why this collation of abuse stories came to be constructed as they did. For example, Cheit does not place the witch hunt narrative within works of critical childhood scholars who consider the rise of risk anxiety about children and childhood during this period as indicative of broader social malaise about the collapse of family, gender norms, and cultural ties (Jackson and Scott, 1999). Indeed, reading the book now, at a time where child sexual abuses cases have a very high media profile, where the reporting is indicative of fears of the foreigner, the groomer, and the stranger (Cockbain, 2006) such an oversight is striking. Nor does the book explore how the witch hunt narrative works – who is complicit in the production of this phenomenon, how does information become sensation and how have child abuse stories shifted from the ‘crime story’ genre into one of their own (Hall et al, 2002). This is the main weakness of the book; the detailed empirical work is somewhat sublimated by a lack of interrogation about the emergence and power of the ‘witch hunt narrative’ as a specific and contextualised social phenomenon.
Sustainability, 2019
Global food insecurity levels remain stubbornly high. One of the surest ways to grasp the scale a... more Global food insecurity levels remain stubbornly high. One of the surest ways to grasp the scale and consequence of global inequality is through a food systems lens. In a predominantly urban world, urban food systems present a useful lens to engage a wide variety of urban (and global) challenges—so called ‘wicked problems.’ This paper describes a collaborative research project between four urban food system research units, two European and two African. The project purpose was to seek out solutions to what lay between, across and within the different approaches applied in the understanding of each city’s food system challenges. Contextual differences and immediate (perceived) needs resulted in very different views on the nature of the challenge and the solutions required. Value positions of individuals and their disciplinary “enclaves” presented further boundaries. The paper argues that finding consensus provides false solutions. Rather the identification of novel approaches to such w...
Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe - HAL - Université Paris Descartes, Nov 4, 2021
The right of Christian Reynolds, Tammara Soma, Charlotte Spring, and Jordon Lazell to be identifi... more The right of Christian Reynolds, Tammara Soma, Charlotte Spring, and Jordon Lazell to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Food Ethics, 2022
COVID-19 caused levels of household food insecurity to spike, but the precarity of so many people... more COVID-19 caused levels of household food insecurity to spike, but the precarity of so many people in wealthy countries is an outgrowth of decades of eroding public provisions and labour protections that once protected people from hunger, setting the stage for the virus’ unevenly-distributed harms. The prominence of corporate-sponsored foodbanking as a containment response to pandemic-aggravated food insecurity follows decades of replacing rights with charity. We review structural drivers of charity’s growth to prominence as a hunger solution in North America, and of its spread to countries including the UK. By highlighting pre-pandemic pressures shaping foodbanking, including charities’ efforts to retool themselves as health providers, we ask whether anti-hunger efforts during the pandemic serve to contain ongoing socioeconomic crises and the unjust living conditions they cause, or contest them through transformative pathways to a just food system. We suggest that pandemic-driven ph...
Food Ethics, 2022
COVID-19 caused levels of household food insecurity to spike, but the precarity of so many people... more COVID-19 caused levels of household food insecurity to spike, but the precarity of so many people in wealthy countries is an outgrowth of decades of eroding public provisions and labour protections that once protected people from hunger, setting the stage for the virus' unevenly-distributed harms. The prominence of corporate-sponsored foodbanking as a containment response to pandemic-aggravated food insecurity follows decades of replacing rights with charity. We review structural drivers of charity's growth to prominence as a hunger solution in North America, and of its spread to countries including the UK. By highlighting pre-pandemic pressures shaping foodbanking, including charities' efforts to retool themselves as health providers, we ask whether anti-hunger efforts during the pandemic serve to contain ongoing socioeconomic crises and the unjust living conditions they cause, or contest them through transformative pathways to a just food system. We suggest that pandemic-driven philanthropic and state funding flows have bolstered foodbanking and the food system logics that support it. By contextualising the complex and variegated politics of foodbanking in broader movements, from community food security to food sovereignty, we reframe simplistic narratives of charity and highlight the need for justice-oriented structural changes in wealth redistribution and food system organisation if we are to prevent the kinds of emergency-within-emergency that we witnessed as COVID-19 revealed the proximity of many to hunger.
The Sociological Review, 2015
Policy Futures in Education, Jan 3, 2019
CLoK Central Lancashire online Knowledge www.clok.uclan.ac.uk Sites of learning: exploring politi... more CLoK Central Lancashire online Knowledge www.clok.uclan.ac.uk Sites of learning: exploring political ecologies and visceral pedagogies of surplus food redistribution in the UK
Researching Poverty and Austerity: Theoretical Approaches, Methodologies and Policy Applications, 2023
Research observed how food providers in the United States and Canada have made changes during the... more Research observed how food providers in the United States and Canada have made changes during the decades of neoliberal policymaking that have seen foodbanking expand across North America and beyond. These changes, in part, reflect responses to critiques of foodbanking as an inadequate solution to food insecurity. Food charities have variously attempted to improve provision through healthier procurement, choice-based distribution models, diversified programming, and advocacy for policy solutions. Better foodbanking, however, does not negate the influence of corporate donors on food charities’ capacity to foster hunger-preventative change, such as the employment practices of those same donors. Meanwhile, grassroots organisers have pushed for systemic solutions to food insecurity and food waste, whether disillusioned volunteers or mutual aid providers. These often operate with far fewer resources than the corporate donors, government agencies and philanthropists shaping foodbanking trajectories. Given the barriers to truly doing themselves out of a job, the chapter asks how far such changes address problems of institutionalised emergency food redistribution as outlined by Poppendieck’s Sweet Charity (1998), and what lessons these might yield for UK practitioners and decision-makers.