Ken MacDonald

I'm cross-appointed between The Dept. of Human Geography and the Department of Global Development Studies at UTSC, and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at UTSG. I'm also a core faculty member in the Culinaria Research Centre, U of T's hub for food research. My teaching is spread across these programs and some recent undergraduate courses include Philanthrocapitalism and Development; Transnational Toronto; Diasporic Foodways; and Social Geographies of Street Food. Recent Graduate courses include seminars on Geographies of Regulation; Food Culture and Society; and Comparative Research Methods in Diaspora and Transnational Studies I have ongoing research interests in a number of areas that seek to understand the role of transnational processes in the reproduction of cultural formations. Some of this work includes:

• a focus on the role of transnationalism and transnational ideologies in the production of cultural identity (primarily in northern Pakistan and India);
• the postcolonial politics of development including an exploration of the mechanisms through which transnational ideological constructs of ‘frontier’ and ‘development’, have become instrumental to a diversity of projects that contest practices of state domination while reproducing ideological foundations grounded in imperialism.
• the cultural politics of environmental governance, which explores how institutions of environmental governance have been produced as mechanisms that enable environmental conservation as a basis of capital accumulation, ultimately expressed through forms of valuation and financialization that produce new forms of dispossession and alienation from land.

This work brings ethnographic practice to the study of transnational environmental organizations and institutions I also have a specific interest in Food Studies and has undertaken a number of projects including:

• the production and configuration of transnational cultural economies, using food, particularly cheese, as a lens through which to understand processes of qualification and how they work to produce and mediate the meaning and value of 'cultural' products.
• The cultural politics of agrarian change in the wine sector of Languedoc-Rousillon (Occitanie) with a specific focus on the historical role of cooperative production in community reproduction and the challenges posed to cooperatives brought on by a large-scale, capital intensive, shift to organic production.
• A political economy of public markets and street food in Toronto with a specific focus on the role of municipal institutions and organizational cultures in facilitating a transition to privatized food provisioning and restricting equitable access to food on the streets and public spaces of the city.
• The rise of vulnerability within urban food systems, with a specific focus on Toronto and the social means through which people cope with inequitable access to food intensified by crises such as the current pandemic and climate change.

Publications 

2020 (with Scott Prudham) Qualifying Tradition: Instituted Practices in the Making of the Organic Wine Market. Journal of Agrarian Change. DOI: 10.1111/joac.12371

2017 (with P. Wilshusen) Fields of Green: Corporate Sustainability and the Production of Economistic Environmental Governance. Environment and Planning A, 22 pp. DOI: 10.1177/0308518X17705657

2013 Grabbing ‘Green’: Cynical Reason, Instrumental Ethics and the Production of ‘The Green Economy’, Human Geography 6(1) 46-63.

2013 The Morality of Cheese: The Paradox of Defensive Localism in a Transnational Cultural Economy. Geoforum, 44, 93-102.