Current food production is facing increasing criticism related to aspects such as unsustainable farming practices, unjust working conditions, mass production, or high food waste. Consumers are rarely able to comprehend under which social and environmental conditions their food is produced and small businesses along the value chain, including small farms and shops, struggle to be economically competitive, facing the market power of big actors.
To counteract these developments, more and more consumers and food chain actors are developing and engaging with food-related social innovations such as food saving apps (“ToGoodToGo”), food sharing or community-supported supermarkets or food cooperatives.
The seminar offers students the opportunity to conduct independent research on food-related social innovations. Students will form a research team, choose food-related social innovation of their interest and explore to what degree the innovation is related to topics such as food democracy, inclusiveness and justice in the food system and the wider topic of sustainable agri-food systems. Students will learn and apply social science methods throughout the course.
In our seminar, we follow a research-based learning approach: Together with us, two doctoral researchers at Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (www.zalf.de), you get the opportunity to jointly work in a research team and get the chance to go through the different phases of an empirical research process. From finding a topic and research questions to the publication of the results. This also means that we will collect and analyze research data during the seminar and aim at the publication of our results in the form of a scientific article afterwards.
Active participation in the research process is mandatory for the completion of the course.
The seminar will take place every Thursday during the summer term from 16-18h (c.t.) in presence or online dependent on Covid situation. Times are subject to changes if all participants agree to.
Please get in touch with us prior to the seminar via E-Mail to jonathan.friedrich@zalf.de and felix.zoll@zalf.de.
The course is mainly open to master’s students but also bachelor students from the fourth semester onwards. Basic knowledge of empirical social science methods is mandatory for the successful participation in the course.
The seminar will be interdisciplinary connecting social science methods with a natural science context and addresses especially disciplines that have a societal or environmental focus such as agricultural and horticultural studies, human geography, sociology or political science as well as students from cultural studies or philosophy as we will cover topics such as just access to healthy nutrition and food democracy more broadly.
However, basic knowledge of social theories is advantageous for seminar participation. The seminar will be held in English but sufficient German knowledge to carry out data collection would be of great help.
