This study is an examination of the role of community-based food projects in place making and collective futuring efforts. I look specifically at food access projects in Dayton, Ohio, a city I have personal connections to. In this study, I forefront the concepts of relationality, co-creation, ownership, economic (dis)investment, soil systems, and regeneration as they emerge from my fieldwork on food access in Dayton, which consisted of interviews, participant observation, and spatial analysis. My methodology centers on critical mapping which the traces conceptual and material connections that shape food access in Dayton and situate community-based efforts within broader economic and political landscapes. In doing so, I demonstrate how food access can be conceptualized in terms of global contours and local manifestations. I draw on the work of Anna Tsing, Karl Polanyi, Jason Moore and Bikrum Gill, to develop a political ecology of encounter that examines the historical roots and ongoing practices of enclosure as a tactic of governance that shapes human-nature relations in specific ways. I demonstrate how these acts of enclosure bring to the fore certain ecological relations in ways that uphold dominant systems of power, while obfuscating other ecological relations. This allows me to theorize encounters between individuals, communities, and environments as political sites of both impasse and change. I conclude that food (in)access is a feature of the production and management of eco-social relations by governments, communities, and individuals. Thus, in focusing on the eco-social relations and encounters that are fostered through food production, distribution, and consumption, communities can (and are) working to build more socially and ecologically just futures. / Doctor of Philosophy / This study draws on research in ecological sciences and social sciences as well as data gleaned from interviews and observations in Dayton, Ohio to explore the role of community-based food systems in building resilience against the cascading effects of anthropogenic climate change. I turn to Dayton largely due to my personal connection to the city. This speaks to this study's attentiveness to community building efforts of folks in Dayton and attention to politics of the everyday. Using interviews, observations, and scholarship in political ecology, I map the efforts of Dayton residents to improve community food access within broader economic, social, and political systems to show how these projects both improve food access for communities and promote a sort of politics that contributes to the economic, ecological, and social health of Dayton communities. This positions these projects as important efforts in building resilience against ongoing and intensifying disturbances and disasters from climate change amidst the ongoing failure of political and economic institutions to enact meaningful change. Finally, I explore how these findings help to develop a broader research framework that is grounded in lived experience and attentive to broader political, social, and economic systems.

For almost two decades, Coastal GasLink, with the support of the State of British Columbia (B.C.), Canada, has sought to build a hydrofracking gas pipeline, which would cross a large part of Wet’suwet’en Nation’s territories. Faced with this, the different clans that make up the Nation, under the governance system of the Hereditary Chiefs, have expressed their disagreement, demonstrating that the environmental assessment and decision-making processes overlooked their deep relationship with the Yintakh (their territory). Drawing on a methodological approach that involved visual ethnography and combined content and narrative analysis, my research aims to analyze the role that emotions play in the territorial-ontological conflict between the State of B.C., Coastal GasLink, and the Wet’suwet’en. The combination of content and narrative analysis helped decipher and understand how people express everyday practices and construct and perform their identity amid the conflict. In facing COVID-19 pandemic limitations, visual ethnography provided an alternative to fieldwork. Using online available audiovisual material, through which I was able to keep a phenomenological approach, I used my senses (visual and auditory) to analyze body movements, tone of voice, and language. The theoretical approach to the conflict was from that of political ontology and emotional political ecologies (EmPEs). To answer my first research question: how is the conflict of interest an ontological conflict? I articulate a framework made up of Ingold’s phenomenology, Blaser’s ontological conflicts, and Escobar's studies of culture as a radical difference. To answer my second research question: what is the role that emotions play in the conflict? I build on the spiderweb, a metaphor developed by Ingold, to expand the scope of González-Hidalgo’s emotional political ecologies. I demonstrate that the processes of political inter-subjectivation sought at the Unist’ot’en Healing Center help understand, on the one hand, the worry, frustration, and stress of the Wet'suwet'ens facing the world-creating practices of Coastal GasLink and the State of B.C. On the other hand, the Healing Center reveals how the affections for the other-than-human and their relational world inform Wet’suwet’en resistance. Lastly, I unveil how Coastal GasLink and the Ministry of Aboriginal Rights and Reconciliation, through discourses and practices of inclusion and gender equality, seek to blur radical cultural differences, delegitimize the Wet’suwet’en pre-colonial governance system, and create affections for the Western-modern world.