Metadata Commons Tools for building effective food knowledge sharing small data repositories Dr. Kirsten Valentine Cadieux Matt Gunther Environmental Studies and Anthropology Sociology Hamline University University of Minnesota Saint Paul, Minnesota Minneapolis, MN kvcadieux@hamline.edu Abstract—This electronic document is a “live” template. The assessments of shared food knowledge that both assert the le- various components of your paper [title, text, heads, etc.] are gitimacy of multiple perspectives--when people tell their own already defined on the style sheet, as illustrated by the portions stories and make their own interpretations--and also provide given in this document. DO NOT USE SPECIAL CHARAC- supports for participants to practice negotiating different evalu- TERS, SYMBOLS, OR MATH IN YOUR TITLE OR AB- STRACT. (Abstract) ative frameworks for what makes food good. Starting from an Index Terms—Component, formatting, style, styling, insert. attempt to engage multiple communities in sharing the work of (key words) interpretation of a collection of food stories gathered around a 2000-person community meal, we explore some of the ways I. INTRODUCTION: METADATA FOR CHARACTERIZING that convention theory has provided guidance for navigating epistemological boundaries and fostering a community of ex- EVIDENCE FOR WHAT MAKES FOOD GOOD tended peer review. The question "What makes food good?" lies at the center of contemporary agrifood activism--and also at the center of much antagonism in food politics, often a bellwether of broader sus- II. SHARING COMMUNITY FOOD MOVEMENT KNOWLEDGE tainability knowledge politics. Intrigued by the challenge of ACROSS DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES supporting productive agonism amongst a wide range of often competing actors in the food system in the U.S. Upper Midwest The Food Field Guides project explores mechanisms for (a region heavily identified with its breadbasket functions of encouraging users of a shared online knowledge base designed “feeding the world”), and informed by instructional technology to support community organizing for transformation of food uses of knowledge systems for sustainability [1], we have de- systems toward sustainability. The project attempts to share veloped a translational online catalogue of multiple food food movement knowledge across different perspectives. In our knowledges [2]. Starting with a wide range of over 100 collab- efforts to assemble and catalogue multiple kinds of food orative research and documentation projects exploring commu- knowledge, we recognize that asserting public space for legiti- nity food issues, we have attempted to build orientation and mizing marginalized experiences and discourses exacerbates translation frameworks in an online knowledge sharing plat- their vulnerability to critique. Consequently, we have used In- form that foregrounds users’ justifications for the utility and formation and Communication Technology (ICT) methods that value of various food knowledges and modes of learning. From attempt to address the likelihood that the same power dynamics this start, we have extended invitations to a series of overlap- delegitimizing these voices in broader society will also delegit- ping networks to support the sharing of stories in the context of imize them in the knowledge sharing sites we develop. food politics. The resulting FoodFieldGuides.com food- movement knowledge-sharing site provides a case study for In our attempt to account both for the systemic consensus exploring how different knowledge cultures work together, and of food practices as well as the many points of critique that what pedagogical and public research tools can support such actors level against each other and the food system [4], we've collaborative learning. been inspired to approach many of the ideas set forward in Thévenot and Boltanski's 2006 On Justification [3]. Unlike Information, communication, and process tools play com- many sociologists and theorists of political economy who ex- plementary roles in the collaborative processes involved in plore critique and consensus in large part by examining social curating online repositories of community knowledge. The practices and regimes of power organizing the food system field of participatory planning of complex systems has contrib- more directly, Boltanski and Thévenot approach power rela- uted a range of tools for systemic understanding that can be tions in part via the moments in which people evaluate each combined with tools for communicative practice [2], a combi- others' behaviors and claims. Specifically, they suggest that nation that helps scaffold an approach to the challenge of shar- people invoke different regimes of logic (regimes de la gran- ing food knowledge that has been built on a foundation of con- deur) in different spheres of life that each demand their own vention theory. Convention theory [3] has helped us negotiate types of justice. They focus on six that correspond to economic practices for sharing metadata. We are eliciting and sharing life, administrative live (governance), domestic life, transcen- dental experience, and the general civic will. In addition to public university, or at any institution conventionally empow- examining the general logic of these six regimes, Boltanski and ered with the ability to legitimate expertise. Crucially, we note Thévenot demonstrate that actors also seem to strategically that legitimacy in academic circles is awarded most readily on deploy pieces of each in order to pursue their own interests. the basis of publication in journals that, in turn, place public Hence, the process of establishing "equivalence" between knowledge behind an access paywall. Particularly in food stud- events classified in normally separate spheres of life becomes a ies, we also note that knowledge legitimated within one disci- central strategy deployed by actors in debates about justice. pline or department does not necessarily become salient throughout the whole of the university. Instead, we observe that For us, this is a practical problem especially exemplified in much of food studies - like much of food activism - remains its embedded tagging system, FoodWords, which was devel- siloed within disciplinary circles, even despite the wave of in- oped out of engagement with community justifications for what terest in contemporary food politics that has swollen in recent makes food good. We cannot make large claims based on our years. work so far that any consensus about or translational work re- garding the question "What makes food good?" emerging here In response, we propose a formal process designed to em- provides evidence for or will lead to a cultural change, or even bolden community food knowledges in a manner that improves a real change in the way individual users act in their daily life. their discoverability, legibility, and legitimacy within and Instead, our project steps back from the precipice of discursive beyond the epistemological networks in which they normally action and reports on our asking our users to share and expli- circulate. cate what and how they know. Our purpose is understanding ICT tools can better support exploratory rapprochement be- A. Discoverability of Food Knowledges tween food movement positions that appear irreconcilable. We’ve been experimenting with ways to negotiate between different understandings in ways that can help people navigate Working together without unifying consensus each others’ food knowledge. We find convention theory a If people are attempting to work together (or in alliances), useful tool for this, because it helps us think about how to ap- we need to be able to address the challenge of disparate under- proach existing conventions for naming, valuing, and acting on standings of what’s happening and what should happen in ways parts of food systems, and then to name these conventions in that don’t require a unified perspective. Recognizing that there ways that are recognizable to people -- and, further, to support are many different ways to value what’s good about food, our the development of practices that reach between existing con- project has been structured around a series of challenges facing ventions and negotiate working models of talking about food food movement organizing, challenges that have become sali- work that are mutually comprehensible across differences. ent to our processes of trying to support knowledge exchange around food, in order to support people working to address Inspired by the work of Thévenot and Boltanski [3], we problems together, even when they disagree or value different view food justice as more than a matter of critical social sci- things. As an extension beyond the North American “alterna- ence, insofar as critical enterprises often adopt projects inspired tive food movement,” with its operational premise that opposi- by political economy in order to identify sources of power and tional “alternative” values may be widely shared outside a exploitation. Instead, we envision a sociology (or broader so- mainstream “conventional” food production system, scholar- cial science) of criticism that helps actors to identify existing ship and activism more broadly aligned with the more diverse conventions for naming, valuing, and acting on parts of food platforms of “food justice” and “food sovereignty” seek to systems. Further, in the Food Field Guides project we have avoid subsuming situated food knowledges into a single oppo- created one experimental structure designed to improve univer- sitional framework. Instead, its advocates have called for the sity capacity for preserving and curating polyphonic critical institutionalization of accountability for -- and responsiveness perspectives. Our work attends to the challenges of discovera- to -- what Chantal Mouffe calls an agonistic pluralism of criti- bility, legibility, and legitimacy each in turn through a digital cal perspectives [5][6]. Following Slocum and Cadieux’s call publishing platform operating in conjunction with community for an approach to food justice that borrows from feminist, based research projects, libraries, and public groups not directly antiracist, and anti-colonial epistemologies [7][8], our work affiliated with our own local public university, the University considers how food justice practitioners might possibly inter- of Minnesota in Minneapolis. vene in progressive food policies and programs without univer- salizing consensus about the desirability of outcomes at all Thinking particularly about the dual problems of paywall social levels. We thereby posit one possible framework for access and disciplinary regimes of knowledge production, the sustaining productive dissonance within a social movement that Food Field Guides project seeks to expand upon conventional too often fetishizes the harmonic “community” or “local” food storage and retrieval practices that help to determine where system. knowledge travels at the university and amongst the public. For its part, the university library employs a sophisticated metadata In doing so, we recognize that many excellent community- scheme designed to guide user paths of inquiry through a based research projects have helped to reveal the dominance of standard set of search terms: these include familiar criteria such white middle class imaginaries manifested in the alternative as author, title, publication, copyright date, and subject in addi- food movement [9]. Our specific interests rest with the question tion to an unrestricted “tag” vocabulary aggregated through of what happens to community knowledge after it arrives at the user contributions. Ultimately, however, we observe that the trajectory of artifacts in the library system remain anchored by crowd. In short, we know nothing about the standpoints from the authority of institutional conventions and consensus, there- which metadata contributors view the item in question. Follow- by limiting the visibility of critical perspectives. ing Boltanski and Thévenot, we consider the process of “quali- fying subjects” to be an integral part of evaluation and critique: To illustrate, we invite the reader to imagine one specific without accountability, we find it impossible to determine what library artifact. Take, for example, a book: Julian Agyeman and perspectives are represented or marginalized in discourses of Alison Hope Alkon’s germinal collection Cultivating Food value. Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability [9]. Published in 2011, Agyeman and Alkon’s work represents the one of the first and Fortunately, faculty and students at the university engage most well-known efforts to bridge critical race and gender con- almost constantly in the process of justifying provocative com- cepts with the study of alternative food systems, and it is one of binations of texts for the purpose of answering specific re- the texts most frequently cited by scholars working to develop search questions. Embedded in countless syllabi, graduate stu- a food justice literature. Yet, its trajectory remains limited with- dent reading lists, and seminar blog posts are justifications of in a relatively small subset of knowledge regimes at the univer- exactly this type. In its simplest form, then, we describe the sity and beyond. Field Guides to Food project as an effort to capture this meta- content and store it in disaggregated form at the university li- We imagine several reasons why this might be so. One is brary. There, we link curatorial choices to individual profiles in the problem of spatial storage: like most large university librar- order to permit users to understand for whom and in what con- ies, the Minnesota library system actually consists of a network texts a particular artifact appears valuable. We envision a of several separate buildings, each containing texts divided by framework in which these profiles are linked to blogs or other college, discipline, and subject. For an interdisciplinary item knowledge sharing sites maintained by faculty, staff, students, like Cultivating Food Justice, curation in one building may and other public collaborators, who map the relationship of signify its value within an epistemological regime tied to disci- texts to specific projects--and this basic framework describes plinary conventions. In fact, at the University of Minnesota the aspiration of our broader project, as well, connecting the library, Cultivating Food Justice is stored alongside texts in the justifications for their creation and use to various knowledge Food, Agricultural and Natural Resources Sciences library, artifact that we have gleaned from existing archives. some five miles from those materials deemed conventionally valuable to social science department. We suggest that the spa- Improving the transparency of systems that store and curate tial placement of Cultivating Food Justice contributes to its knowledge is an important first step in improving the universi- salience within the field of “food studies,” but also erodes its ty’s capacity for critical perspectives. A structural improvement visibility in the disciplines of sociology and geography. such as the Food Field Guides empowers library users to see that the endorsement of knowledge by a part of the university Of course, digital library catalogues have made possible the does not necessarily imply its endorsement by the university in listing of materials within an unlimited set of intersecting sub- whole. Instead, it transforms the university into a site of con- ject categories. Cultivating Food Justice, for its part, appears in tested knowledge capable of accommodating multiple and the following subject paths: sometimes contradictory regimes of justification. Further, while • Food consumption -- United States we cannot bring whole texts like Cultivating Food Justice out • Minorities -- Nutrition -- United States from behind publisher paywalls, we do propose that the intro- duction of blogging platforms may help introduce users to its • Poor -- Nutrition -- United States central concepts and perceived relationships with other content- • African American -- Nutrition -and parallel projects like Critical Commons provide methods • Discrimination -- United States for making fair use claims on specific content for which analy- • Social justice -- United States sis or explication of use has been provided. In this way, we understand the qualifications of individual curators and their In addition to this list, users may also suggest unrestricted justifications for sharing learning materials as crucial parts of “tags” signifying the item’s value within any number of con- improving the discoverability of artifacts across conventional texts. These user-submitted tags are aggregated and displayed disciplinary contexts and other silos separating knowledge do- in a list ordered by vote. To date, Cultivating Food Justice has mains. been tagged just once each for: • Food Justice (1) B. Legibility of Food Knowledges • Geography (1) The Food Field Guide project using the Scalar platform, a • Agri-food studies (1) modular model for sharing media-rich knowledge -- really, a metadatabase, which we have used to attempt to make commu- • Sociology (1) nity-university collaborative knowledge about food and feeding more discoverable, and also more legible. Starting with an ex- While we applaud these efforts to democratize the process tensive intervention in the way public intellectuals talk about of evaluating knowledge across conventional boundaries, we feeding (shifting from industry-derived justifications for note that the current system anonymizes the metadata contribu- productivism to more critical frameworks for exploring how tions of library users while providing scant opportunity for people ARE feeding each other), a reading and research collab- individuals to contest the summary logic of an aggregate orative at the University of Minnesota and several nearby edu- cational institutions surveyed agrifood projects that had in- more hostile forms of criticism that seek to prove actors right volved both community and university researchers, and fo- or wrong (precisely because they fail to recognize multiple cused on knowledge likely to have ended up in binders shelved "regimes of justification"). Some of the features that appear to in not-publicly-accessible offices, defunct websites, or confus- support this praxis supporting legibility include: ing databases with obscure constrained search vocabularies. • Helping to keep contributions recognizable to their Addressing these discoverability challenges involved making contributors, and to make it possible to track the work different food knowledge legible beyond mere location: we that’s done on knowledge artifacts (i.e. through inten- also needed to figure out what kind of metadata, explanations, tional and well described versioning of documents -- and justifications would be recognizable both to those who had while also avoiding being overwhelming in the pro- contributed knowledge and those who would be looking for it. cess detail). This helps authors recognize different voices and also acknowledges and provokes tools to Our project started with a series of projects that had been address the common violences and conversions that sponsored by university entities with significant investment in are done to shared knowledge in knowledge shaping and identity-claims associated with public engagement: domains. • the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA, • And addressing attention to questions of adequacy and which sponsored 35 semester-long, community-driven fidelity: in order to help knowledge users see the con- local food projects over the five years during which text in which people have developed their perspec- this project was developed); tives, and to elicit enough explicit justification for the • the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS, an interdisci- sharing of knowledge across different perspectives so plinary center that hosted a symposium and faculty that people can make more intentional decisions about seminar in 2011-2012 on the topic of how we talk how much context is adequate to reproduce the ideas about “feeding the world,” and which had also ar- they’re sharing with fidelity commensurate to their in- chived over 50 agrifood talks, and through a collabo- tentions. ration with the television show The Bat of Minerva, over 50 additional long-form interviews, many with academics who had given the IAS talks, and addition- C. Legitimacy of Food Knowledges al interviews with community members, including In the space of the Food Field Guides project, we attempt to two series specifically about agrifood systems--in the make it clear that: heart of the SW Minnesota cornbelt and in Austria); • Different perspectives are welcome, and that they will • Healthy Foods, Healthy Lives and the Regional Part- be expected to provide explanations of how their nerships for Sustainable Rural Development (two ad- analyses are supported and why they are legitimately ditional research and action entities that support con- warranted. siderable numbers of community-university agrifood • Authorial voices may be polyvocal, and authority can projects); and come from different kinds of argument-making. • the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture • Translation between perspectives is valuable, but is (MISA, a collaboration between the University and not reserved as a role for the intellectual authority of several locally headquartered agrifood entities, includ- designated interlocutors. ing the Land Stewardship Project, Institute for Agri- • Compromise should not be synonymous with hegem- culture and Trade Policy, and the Minnesota Food As- ony. sociation), which, among other projects, holds a de- funct website that exhaustively catalogued urban agri- We operationalize these through a series of values state- culture resources and actors in 2010. ments with accompanying evaluative questions: 1. All people should have the chance to explore, shape, and In our project, which has been structured around recurring tell their own food stories. consultation with different knowledge communities who have Are we engaging an adequate range of perspectives and contributed to and might wish to access all of the above types of knowledge? knowledge resources, we recognize "legibility" as relating not Are we being adequately inclusive at all stages in our pro- only to clarity and discoverability, but also to translation and cess, with opportunities for all participants to define problems preservation of knowledges. Central questions related to legi- and solutions -- as well as the system in question, including bility include: communication and process tools to be used? • How might our project help the university to curate 2. People should be able to learn from each other, and nego- food knowledge without appropriating / changing it in tiate and tell stories in relationship, in order to figure out how some way? to modify and support stories and actions that improve our • How does our project support Mouffian agonism ra- conditions. ther than dialogic consensus? How are we learning from each other? (What is surprising us about what we’re learning?) By formally separating knowledge artifacts from work per- How adequately are we generating useful information for formed ON those artifacts (i.e. distinguishing data from and from all participants? metadata), we're working to promote CURATION rather than How are we able to put what we’re learning into action as relationships that may be useful in building the mutual legiti- we go along? macy of different domains of food knowledge production. In 3. Our explanations should relate our experiences to our so- turn, this public emphasis involves a participatory, transforma- cial and environmental relationships, recognizing that different tive, and performative scholarship that recognizes the process relationships will shape different environments and perspec- of exploratory learning in relationship as central to the purpose tives, and that part of the work of our stories is translating be- of research and teaching. Rigorous collective public develop- tween these. ment and analysis of knowledge involves a co-education pro- Are we considering the contexts of the systems in question cess committed to communicative participation, accountability, and their relationships across scale? transparency, solidarity, and equity. Are we addressing conflicts among perspectives? Practical case studies seem crucial to this approach, as a domain for learning in relationship while doing—rather than Following from the three principles above, the process of trying to reconstruct learning processes only out of questioning developing investigations of *how people feed each other* past processes, etc. should address: A. The need to reorient the question of “how do we feed Via this work, our project makes performative claims about the world” to “how are people feeding each other?,” with atten- the public facingness of public institutions. For example, for tion to what that reorientation makes possible and what is dif- University libraries and archives, it makes subaltern claims on ferent between those investigations. This reorientation helps to state-centered knowledge domains. And in the community- integrate the natural and technical science approaches to feed- engaged research hubs (MISA / CURA / IAS), which are still ing with popular approaches as well as approaches from the within the center, it provides impetus to build network hubs social science and humanities, and to address dissonances in beyond the center (how to make claims on the center for sup- different understandings of the challenges of food security. port without giving up “small data” power). This has several The focus here is on what works to enable people to feed implications for the qualification of legitimacy: each other—as well as on providing people with ways to ex- • It de-automatizes the University’s stamp as legitimizer plore how orthodox explanations of food security work have (taking away automatic imprimatur of legitimacy); us- come to be dominant. (A subsidiary focus is on collecting vari- ing convention theory to show the heterogeneity of the ous ways that people set about exploring feeding on their own university, this approaches gives more access to spe- terms as a sort of collective exploratory curriculum, recogniz- cific modes of legitimacy justification via the fore- ing that assertions to deconstruct status quo explanations are grounding of regimes of justification, unlikely to be as effective as more participatory investigation- • It provides more access to traditionally non-legitimate based inquiry.) feeling actors to make justification claims, a particu- B. The challenges of upscaling and downscaling knowledge larly important characteristic of this approach in the practices as appropriate—challenges that are particularly sali- domain of food knowledge, where everyone knows ent in the context of understanding the Midwest in global con- things, but many people’s knowledge has been con- text. Understanding the global flows that have shaped specific structed as unqualified. dynamics (the shape of the current food system in the mid- • And answering obvious challenges of such a complex west)—and the corollary ways that specific local events, rela- problem, we are operationalizing the use of this plat- tionships, and efforts have had global effects (the role of the form by training students (in service learning contexts midwest in the roll out of various green revolution technologies and paid internships) to act as community process and relationships) is crucial for facilitating dialogue between supporters. These students carry out the otherwise of- people who focus on different scales of food activity. This dia- ten-overlooked tasks of adding metadata. We add this logue across different scales is, in turn, crucial for building competency to basic political storytelling training (in a shared understandings of how we have come to the social ar- series of existing programs), adding critical coding rangements in which we find ourselves and how we can im- skills and metadata handling as part of a platform for prove these to address the challenges that face us. public food knowledge engagement. Something that could really benefit from this practice of understanding the implications of moving across scale would be the development of usable public models of who has power III. METADATA FOR FOOD POLITICS: BEYOND WHEN EXPERTS over what value(s) in the food system, under what conditions. RULED FOOD (FUTURE DIRECTIONS / HYPOTHESES) To use an interdisciplinary data-analysis technique as an exam- Building on the literatures of participatory planning of ple, different parts of the food system could be assigned differ- complex systems, community food systems, and conventions ent audio pitches for how much power over them is shared by theory, we have described the development of a metadata the public, and that could be both very interesting to explore standard for food politics that moves beyond existing categori- together and rewarding to enter information into, and to parse cal descriptions of food attributes to embed possibilities for analytically, even for people who do not usually identify with action into the archiving and curated sharing of systemic food such practices. knowledge. The knowledge artifacts shared are coded with an C. The centrality of people acting in relationship and in emergent metadata structure designed collaboratively to sketch place. Exploring popular understandings of food involves re- the relational social space of food system reform, and to enable centering the importance of popular knowledge, action, and communities engaged in transformational food system work to identify models, allies, and examples relevant to their experi- food system) and making it more possible for people to talk ences and goals. Distributed knowledge tools enable communi- about the forces and relations that have led to the current condi- ties promoting alternative, socioecological models of food pro- tions, since these are the conditions that usually need to be en- visioning to challenge the many social injustices and externali- gaged in order to move toward either supportive or transforma- ties of status quo agrifood systems. These systems retain he- tional goals. gemony in significant part through their monopolistic control of (perceived) expertise and of systemic information (for ex- IV. COPYRIGHT FORMS ample, as agrifood surveillance has been significantly privat- [to follow] ized in the era of Big Data, food safety regulations favor capi- tal-intensive processor, and capital flights incentivize foreign ACKNOWLEDGMENT direct investment models of farmland stewardship). This work has been supported by the University of Minne- sota’s Institute for Advanced Study, Global Spotlight Program, There are many ways to think about legitimation of differ- Center for Austrian Studies, and Institute on the Environment. ent kinds of food knowledge, but given the current status of Field testing and content provided by the Bat of Minerva, Ham- food knowledge as significantly captured by experts (especially line University Environmental Studies courses, Urban Farm in Minnesota, the U.S. headquarters of food commodity trading and Garden Alliance, and additional Art of Food in Frogtown and food processing), we highlight a few related centrally to and Rondo partners (funded in this collaboration by a Fresh, Convention Theory. We argue that our structure offers greater Local & Equitable grant from the Kresge Foundation), includ- transparency into the qualifications of experts. Unlike aggre- ing the Twin Cities Community Agricultural Land Trust, Pub- gated metadata fields (like democratized "tags"), Scalar blogs lic Art Saint Paul, Frogtown Farm, and Asian Economic De- invite the user to question what stakes a particular person might velopment Association. Thanks also to colleagues Monica have in a topic. At the same time, our emphasis on context / Saralampi, Phoebe Ward, Tasha LePage, Maria Frank, and regimes of justification makes it difficult for users to write-off Martha Megarry. perspectives they might disagree with (hopefully, they say "oh, this person is just operating within a different logic scheme"). REFERENCES Translating across different goals makes it more possible for people to talk about current conditions from different stand- [1] D. W. Cash, W. C. Clark, F. Alcock, N. M. Dickson, N. points, and to figure out where their actions might correspond, Eckley, D. H. Guston, J. Jäger, and R. B. Mitchell. "Knowledge sys- where they might form alliances, offer mutual support or en- tems for sustainable development." Proceedings of the national acad- gage in collaborative learning. emy of sciences 100, no. 14 (2003): 8086-8091, 2014. [2] K.V. Cadieux, et al., Survey and Communications Tool We address the messy domain of radically open collabora- Exploring Different People’s Understandings of Current and Ideal Food Systems: Stage 1. Report to the SE MN Food Planning Initiative. tive learning with normative and also gestural instructions. In Available from the author or at the SE MN Regional Partnerships page building a platform to support collaboration without consensus, http://www.regionalpartnerships.umn.edu/index.pl?id=5835&isa=Cate we work with the operational goal of understanding other peo- gory&op=show, 2013. ples’ understanding. This has implications for planning and [3] L. Thevenot and L. Boltanski. On Justification: Economies policy, food procurement across a range of scales, and peda- of Worth. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. gogy of both public and scholarly learning. Communities pro- [4] K.V. Cadieux, A field guide to making food good: An inter- moting green decision making and development in the domain active tool for participatory research supporting difficult of sustainable agriculture and community food security face conversations. Public 1, 2013. both the daunting scale of the status quo ICT infrastructure and [5] C. Mouffe. The Democratic Paradox. London ; New York: also significant literacy building challenges. Over the past dec- Verso, 2000. ade of community organizing, the Food Field Guides project [6] C. Rosin and H. Campbell, H. Beyond Bifurcation: Examin- ing the Conventions of Organic Agriculture in New Zealand. Journal has been designed to encourage users to equalize power over of Rural Studies, 25, 35-47, 2009. food knowledge, to vouch for each others’ qualifications and [7] R. Slocum and K. V. Cadieux. Notes on the practice of food credibility as curators and knowledge creators, and to fore- justice in the U.S.: Understanding and confronting trauma and ground metadata about the utility, legitimacy, and relational inequity. Journal of Political Ecology 22:27–52, 2015. accountability of shared knowledge sources. [8] K.V. Cadieux and R. Slocum. What does it mean to do food justice? Journal of Political Ecology 22:1–26, 2015. We hope this project also helps people legitimate each oth- [9] J. Agyeman, and A. H. Alkon, Cultivating Food Justice: ers’ knowledge cultures and better share intellectual authority Race, Class, and Sustainability. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011. in regard to experiential expertises. This would be in stark con- trast to the existing status quo, which is characterized by expert capture of intellectual authority and frequent loss of painstak- ingly gained momentum toward addressable goals. Supporting platforms where people can share learning without ceding intel- lectual authority (e.g. to extractive research), we hope to sup- port food movement work by translating across different goals (involving different understandings of position in relation to