Kenneth Iain MacDonald

Ken MacDonald est au CEFE de septembre 2022 à août 2023.

Short biography

Ken MacDonald is an associate professor at the University of Toronto, cross-appointed  between The Dept. of Human Geography and the Department of Global Development Studies (UTSC), and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies (UTSG). He is also a core faculty member in the Culinaria Research Centre, University of Toronto's hub for food research.

Research interests

He has 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. He also has 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.

Website

https://www.geography.utoronto.ca/people/directories/all-faculty/ken-macdonald