Natalie Marshall

This project examines how people of different race and class backgrounds participate in the Los Angeles food movement, with a focus on how divergent methods of sharing information may shape power inequalities between movement participants. Through fieldwork at city-affiliated and grassroots urban agriculture projects in Los Angeles, my research investigates how different groups communicate their food-related concerns (e.g. in presentations, reports, teach-ins, zines), in order to understand how some stories garner financial and political support over others within the context of the nonprofit-business-government infrastructure of the food movement. Braiding discussions from sociocultural anthropology about racism and classism in food-related and other social movements with linguistic anthropological analyses of discourse genres and power, this project traces how the use of different discursive practices across nodes of the food movement may shape whose visions of a just food system are prioritized in Los Angeles. Through participant observation, audiovisual documentation, interviews, and collaborative archiving, I consider the conventions by which people construct, share, and evaluate information within the LA food movement, and interrogate how these practices eclipse, clash with, or synergize with one another on a city-wide scale, thus offering broader insights into the interrelated production of language and power in social movements.