Graduate Exit Seminar

Caitlin Marquis will present her Graduate Exit Seminar on Tuesday, June 25, at 1:00 p.m. in 245 Kottman Hall. Her presentation will be Civic Agriculture and the Community Experience: The Relationship of Local Food System Participation to Community Sentiment and Local Social Ties.

Recent decades have seen a rising popularity of local food as a commodity, consumer movement, scholarly interest, and community development tool. Civic agriculture is a valuable framework for encapsulating each of these dimensions of local food systems. The theory of civic agriculture emphasizes the building of community and social networks around local food production and consumption. This thesis explored that potential of civic agriculture by investigating the relationship of local food system participation to community sentiment— including community attachment, community satisfaction, and local social ties. Using data from the 2012 Ohio Survey of Food, Agriculture and Environmental Issues, eight multivariate regression models were applied to understand the relationship of local food system participation to four dimensions of community sentiment and four types of local social ties. The findings from this research can be used to understand the role of local food system participation in the interactional field theory of community development, the dialectical tensions between community-oriented and globally-oriented food systems, as well as the strength and practical nature of the claims made by the civic agriculture frame. Suggestions for future research and policy were developed based on the findings.