HCIAS Blogcast: Renata Motta on Food for Justice

Welcome back to the HCIAS Blogcast! This is a series of posts on the HCIAS blog, we summarize some of the key points from our most recent podcast episode. This week, we report on a conversation between HCIAS deputy director Prof. Dr. Renata Motta, Professor of Society, Culture, and Communication In Ibero-America, and HCIAS Publications coordinator Marian Orjuela. Prof. Dr. Motta lets us know about what it has been like leading the research group Food for Justice: Power, Politics and Food Inequalities in a Bioeconomy (2019-2024) at the HCIAS, now that the project is approaching its conclusion.

Food for Justice is a group of young investigators, meaning that it is made up of researchers at the start of their academic careers. The project won its funding from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in a competitive, open application process, in the framework of a line of investigation into the bioeconomy as social change. These funds are made available by the government, in part, to allow post-doctoral researchers without tenure, like Dr. Motta at that time, to become full professors.

Food for Justice team members [L-R]: Dr. Marco Antonio Teixeira, Prof. Dr. Renata Motta, Lea Loretta Zentgraf, and Eryka Silva Galindo

The project focuses on the theme of (in)justice within ecological transformations. There are many debates about the need to transform our current agricultural systems in order to mitigate the impact of climate change, while also meeting the nutritional needs of the planet’s population. However, these changes necessarily entail social changes and raise questions about how inclusive, democratic and egalitarian these processes are. One line of investigation pursued by Food for Justice is to explore the demands made by social movements targeted at injustices in the food system and into social and political innovations that address inequalities undermining food security such as class, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality. Related to this, the project also looks at how some of these demands have already been incorporated into public policy. A final strand of research considers how the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic has intersected with these changes to our agricultural systems.

Prof. Dr. Motta discusses the empirical research which Food For Justice conducts on social mobilizations in two world regions: Europe, with a focus on Germany, and Latin America, predominantly in Brazil, although there are also researchers in the group with an interest in Chile. In the context of Brazil, the project studies the Marcha das Margaridas, a coalition of women’s movements agitating for an alternative model of rural development, social policies and women’s rights incorporating demands for food sovereignty and agroecology. The second case study, in Germany, is the Wir haben es satt! protest marches organized by the Meine Landwirtschaft campaign, a broad coalition of more than 50 NGOs, social movements, and consumer groups.

Prof Dr. Motta, finishes the episode by expressing her hope that Food for Justice will, by the time it concludes, have offered the doctoral and post-doctoral researchers who work on the project an environment to progress professionally, as well as that their work will broaden our theoretical understanding of the different dimensions and axes of food inequalities and find empirical evidence of the dynamics of reproduction and change in food politics.

This HCIAS Blogcast has been just a short recap of a wide-ranging and thought-provoking discussion. If you would like to learn more about our guest and her work, you can listen to the whole episode here. Further information about Food for Justice can also be found on the project’s web pages.