How can civil society support community-based organizing that puts ways of knowing and being at the heart of food systems change?

Drawing upon a collaboration between two non-profit organizations and a community-based network of rural women across Bangladesh, this essay explores frictions and contradictions that trouble our efforts to co-create knowledge for agroecological transformations. Rather than suggesting these troubles can be resolved, the study attempted to agree with them in this article, locating them as vital disruptions to the hegemonic order of one-world-making. Using personal vignettes as framing devices, we combine critical analysis, art, and poetry to explore working with and within a plurality of ways of knowing and being.

With a vignette about soil, this study begin with unsettling questions about what constitutes knowledge in a world where constructs of truth and belief rub up against each other and further tension this in the context of agroecological markets and social justice activism as these intersect with different notions of relationality. This idea is pursued further by introducing a narrative-framing tool called a “value web” which mobilizes both material and immaterial domains of agroecology. Finally, it concludes by examining the role of international civil society in food system transformation and raising fundamental questions of allyship which helps to navigate the constitutive contradictions of knowledge co-creation.