lexicon of sustainability

“If you learn one word, you can actually shift people’s consciousness. You can actually change an entire industry.”
        - Douglas Gayeton

It's a daunting challenge to have to come up with a blog post of some sort after months of inactivity. But we have to take inspiration where we get it, right? So instead of talking about my own research, electoral politics, or Syria (all of which would be fantastic topics for my enterprising fellow bloggers to address, hint hint) I'm going to talk about two things I've had on the brain since the end of the spring semester: food and storytelling. Both are absolutely crucial to our physical and emotional survival as human beings. The industries that produce both are undergoing exciting but also unsettling challenges. And recent attempts to transform both have, I think, some interesting lessons for academics.

Last summer, my friend and talented filmmaker Kim Fox Johnson introduced me to a wonderful book about the culinary culture of Tuscany, titled Slow: Life in a Tuscan Town. The author/photographer of the book, Douglas Gayeton, brilliantly weaves text and image together in order to tell stories and present information in a really refreshing and compelling way.

A few months later, Kim actually met Douglas Gayeton and made an inspiring short film about his artistic process and his quest to help people understand (1) what “sustainability” really means and (2) what they can do to eat and live in a more sustainable manner. For Gayeton, it all begins with words – his example, as you’ll see if you click on the link below, is the term “cage-free.” As a lifelong writer and reader, I love the idea that language possesses the power to interact with and change our reality, and that we don’t have to surrender that power to corporate greed and political expediency. So my challenge to my fellow bloggers and members of the seminar group on Political Culture is to continue to rethink the key terms in our own work and and to strive to find new ways to narrate our research into "the political" and its historical, cultural, and sociological contexts. Because sometimes the telling is as important as the content itself. Who could have predicted that a novel way of describing an egg would be a catalyst for a much larger political and cultural conversation? (Well, okay, culinary historians probably could have predicted that. All the more reason to investigate all of the places where the political appears and shifts, in the past and in the present.)

 Watch Lexicon of Sustainability here.

Origins

Nearly 50 years ago, E.P. Thompson published his magisterial The Making of the English Working Class. This book, and Thompson's subsequent essays on various aspects of working class life and culture, radically reshaped the way historians thought about class, politics, and the writing of history itself. As Geoff Eley and Steven Hahn noted in a recent Vanderbilt History Seminar (VHS) reassessing Thompson's legacy, The Making, in its rereading of practices and values traditionally ignored by political and intellectual historians, opened up new ways of looking at the political. As Eley observes in his book The Crooked Line, Thompson's writings helped to inspire "a radically deinstitutionalized understanding of politics, in which the possible sources of a popular oppositional impulse were now sought away from the recognized arenas of parties, polite associations, and parliaments." In some ways, then, it is to Thompson that many historians today owe their most basic understandings of the concept of "political culture" as something constructed through and manifested in everyday experience. Our challenge today is to build on the framework that Thompson and his followers established, while also addressing the various lacunae - issues of gender, empire, war, etc. - left in Thompson's account.

While not all future VHS conversations will speak to political culture and its historiography in this way, there are many interesting presentations coming up in the spring. You can find out more about the series here: http://www.vanderbilt.edu/historydept/seminar.html.