This dissertation examines the bread subsidy in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. It scrutinizes the socio-political conflicts that surround this policy, the spatial practices that subsume it and the ways in which it is understood and given meaning. Despite repeated attempts by international financial institutions to eliminate them, authoritarian regimes throughout the region have gone to great lengths to maintain this and similar welfare programs, even extending them during the tumult of the so-called ‘Arab Spring.’ This dissertation seeks to answer why. Through the lens of bread, I suggest a new approach to understanding state power, not as the straightforward product of a monolithic entity but as the unstable product of social practices that make the state appear to exist. Building on the work of Judith Butler and Alex Jeffrey, I call these routine actions “performing the state.” The empirical chapters, based on extensive fieldwork in Jordan, attend to how welfare provision not only reflects the state—its capacities, historical development or cultural proclivities—but performs it into being. The analysis centers on how certain institutions and actors, through their imbrication in the social, spatial and political patterns of welfare provision, work to entrench the state—as an idea, a material force and a locus of affective investment—in the lives of citizens. In attending to how the Jordanian state is constituted and reproduced through discourses, spatial practices of reach, moral economies and political rationalities, this study seeks to illuminate the iterative processes of reference that create the appearance of an autonomous structure that both citizens and scholars call the state. By understanding the state as the contingent product of routine performances, we can better examine the disproportionate importance of particular welfare programs to assembling state power and fostering authoritarian outcomes, as well as their links to key political processes and policy outcomes.

In this dissertation I focus on the diversity of alternative food initiatives (AFIs) that have emerged amidst concerns about the corporate-led industrial food system. While there have been significant successes, critics suggest that many AFIs are an inadequate response to the complex problems within the food system, and further, are complicit in propagating neoliberal ideals and facilitating the retrenchment of the state. While these critics identify important challenges, they tend to consider place-based AFIs as operating independently on particular projects, with specific claims, or in isolated sectors of the food system. There has been little documentation or analysis situating AFIs within a broader community of practice. To fill this gap, my research builds on the existing literature to investigate the increasing collaborations among AFIs in Canada. Using a community-based action approach, I explore the development of provincial food networks in British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario and Nova Scotia. I pay particular attention to efforts that foster and maintain these networks by exploring their history, structure and processes of collaboration. My findings reveal that the provincial food networks can be characterized as assemblages constituted by the self-organization of diverse actors through non-hierarchical, bottom-up processes with multiple and overlapping points of contact. Further, I find that AFIs have used networks strategically to contest the rules and institutions of the dominant food system and to develop participatory and democratic practices that challenge the logics of neoliberalism. Based on the results from this research, I argue that besides developing viable place-based alternatives to the dominant food system, AFIs are also involved in prefigurative ways of being - establishing democratic governance structures, building new institutions, and engaging in different kinds of social relations - in the belly of the existing (food) system.

This study evaluates the public market system in New Orleans, Louisiana by focusing on the history of New Orleans public markets, the privatization of food, and the "greening" of the city with the creation of the Crescent City Farmers Market and other grass roots food activist efforts. Using qualitative methods, ethnographic fieldwork, participant observation and interviewing, issues of food access, food security, food production, food locality, quality, and affordability in New Orleans are explored. The history of public markets in New Orleans and the patterns of market proliferation, regulation, and privatization are significant in the landscape of cultural self-identification, community cohesion, neighborhood networks and economic and ecological development and sustainability. The city's various food shopping arenas and their locations become markers of history, status, rebellion, and of the "other," and become centers for issues of health, economy, politics, and food.

This thesis examines the trajectory of food politics and its relationship with modernizing food landscapes. Today’s food politics discussions in the US and other high-income countries lean towards concerns with social issues, while in the recent past it was more focused on producing enough food to feed the growing population – two different situations with important concerns. The question this thesis explores is whether the modernization of society has given us a higher level of wellbeing and a better world through food landscapes and food policy, and how we came up with the current food situations we face today. It looks into the food landscape and policies of the US and its implications on wellbeing, and the dietary transition of Japan, comparing it to other modernized countries. It is important to look at these factors of food politics to see how other countries may handle a food transition, and whether or not there is a direction all countries can go in that will better benefit its food landscapes. Concerns not only lie in producing sufficient yields but also in wellbeing, cultural values, and true consumer demands. Only when true consumer demands are acknowledged individually can the trajectory of food politics be better harnessed and guided to a more desirable outcome than it has been going in so far.

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