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Background information that may support your understanding

Conceptual explainers and further reading

Video Explainer: What is food insecurity?

Slide Show Explainer: Resilience

Further reading on resilience

More Than Just Food: A film about community organisations and their ability to foster local resilience

Blake, M: More than just food: Food Insecurity and resilient place making through community self organising, Sustainability 2019, 11(10), 2942 https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/10/2942

Methodological explainers

I tend to use geographical concepts such as scale, time-space, landscape and place as my key references in this work.  My approach adopts a systems thinking with a strong emphasis on social practices. 

My methodology primarily draws on more qualitative techniques as I am interested in understanding processes, although there are times when understanding the extent to which an activity is happening or understanding the patterns of activity are also useful (which, involves doing quantitative data collection and analysis). 

I am very interested in doing work that creates positive change , as a result I do a lot of work with different community-based and national organisations including local government, community-based organisations, national charities, government bodies (e.g. Defra), and parliamentary groups.  I have also worked with the business sector.  Within this context, I act both as a carrier of knowledge (e.g., an expert that feeds information into a group) but also as someone seeking to enable co-production.

Systems thinking involves moving from observing events or data, to identifying patterns of behaviour overtime, to surfacing the underlying structures that drive those events and patterns.  It moves beyond linear thinking of cause and effect to consider the wider consequences or effects of an intervention or set of activities.

This short film illustrates the concept:

Social Practice Theory: “Rather than focus on the individual, these approaches take the practice as the unit of analysis, showing how social activity is made up of a constellation of human, material and discursive elements.” (Hampton and Adams, 2018, p215).  Practices are comprised of routinised doings and sayings, their material elements, knowledge, and know-how. Practices both shape and are shaped by place.  There are some important differences between behavioural change and social practice theory. This article explains some of these differences.

Co-production (also known as participatory research): This approach to research involves “working with” communities and individuals. Learning is two way, in that the research produces both data for the researcher and learning within the research context by all who are involved. It is also used in intervention support whereby those who are recipients take responsibility for determining what support they need within their everyday life circumstances in order to achieve their own goals.