When is a farm a farm? When is rural rural? Has the issue of the rural-urban continuum returned? Decades ago rural sociology worked itself into two blind alleys: rural-urban differences and attempts to define the rural-urban fringe. Although these conceptual problems eventually were exhausted, recent developments in California raise the possibility of a phoenixlike revival, although in new form. Three cases-the success of Napa Valley winemaking and the urban crowding that has accompanied it, the explosion of wine grape acreage in neighboring Sonoma County as demand for premium wine grapes has increased dramatically, and an antibody-manufacturing goat "farm" in Santa Cruz County-have spurred community controversies and are now generating debates over the definition of "agriculture," whether agriculture is rural, and "When is rural rural?"
The remarkable growth of alternative agrifood movements—organics, fair trade, localism, Slow Food, farmers' markets, community‐supported agriculture, food security, food safety, food sovereignty, anti–genetically modified organisms, animal welfare, and others—and their attraction to younger academic scholars offer a unique opportunity to explore ways to strengthen such movements utilizing the structural position and distinctive skills of academic researchers. The various movements constitute the major resource; sympathetic academic researchers are a second resource. Mobilizing these two resources in a new organization, the Alternative Agrifood Researchers without Borders, has the potential to contribute to strengthening the movements and their original progressive orientations and advancing civil society. To be effective, a new organization should parallel existing structures in state and market but focus on progressive goals aimed at reducing inequalities and expanding political and social participation. In building a body of literature usable for comparative analysis, the goal should be more effective alternative agrifood movements providing better services to broader global constituencies while simultaneously improving academic research quality. I draw on three social theories—resource mobilization, strategic intervention, and structural parallelism—to encourage careful revision of established academic paradigms.
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