Making Food Deserts: The Technopolitics of Mapping Urban Food Access and the Professionalization of Food Justice

Keywords: Food desert, GIS, technopolitics, urban policy, food justice, access, mapping
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 31

Abstract

Through ethnography of the mobilization of the food desert discourse, this research investigates a question possible to assess now several years into the rise of US food desert mapping: what has it meant for “experts” to create and use these maps within the professionalization of food justice? Using ethnographic interviews with city planners and GIS analysts, GIS analysis, and participant observation, I show how the mobilization of food desert maps in Baltimore and Philadelphia has depoliticized what was once seen as a politically radical method of representing structural violence. While the scene’s actors recognize histories of spatialized racism and classism as the cause of contemporary food inequality, mapping projects have legitimized a technocratic framing through the creation, circulation, and remaking of their maps in order to produce “readability” and legitimize technocratic interventions. Although counter narratives demonstrate inconsistencies within this discourse, the food desert mapping discourse constructs a-political rationalizations discounting urban food access narratives that do not fit within projects' modern timeline of progress through food in the city. These findings problematize the notion of food desert maps as “just a starting point” for more nuanced conversation; these maps guide a conversational narrative and political project that not only prescribes surface-level solutions but enacts violence itself by treating structural racism as a factor of past causation but mere present correlation to food access disparities. These findings warrant a reflection among those in the growing field of food justice professionals to think critically about our use of food within work towards justice.