A research project on a Local food system in Finland, Sweden & Latvia

Category: Outreach

  • Alternative Food Worldings

    Alternative Food Worldings

    In a previous blog post, Hanna and Evianna position REKO as an alternative post-growth marketplace “characterized by unique production and consumption practices”. Inspired by this perspective and the broader discussion of local food systems (LFSs) as alternatives, I propose in this blog post that REKO can be understood as a specific form of worlding. It is well established that…

  • REKO AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO … WHAT?

    REKO AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO … WHAT?

    REKO is an alternative local food network (Leipämaa-Leskinen, 2021). But what is REKO an alternative to? This is a question that has puzzled us since we started exploring REKO in 2013 and revisited it in 2023. In this blog text, we reflect on the question through our past and current ethnographic research. Hanna has been…

  • A reflection on the unexpected intersection of social media, alternative food markets, and the complexities of algorithmic governance

    In 2010, I began researching the impact of social media on the boundary between work and personal life. This was six years after Facebook’s inception and six years before the introduction of Facebook Marketplace and the formalization of platform-based buying and selling. At the time, I couldn’t have foreseen the emergence of alternative food markets…

  • Unusual Organization in Unusual Places: Where is REKO?

    Unusual Organization in Unusual Places: Where is REKO?

    I have long had a fascination with places. When I arrive somewhere, I like to walk the streets, the forests paths, or visit a supermarket. These all tell me something, albeit I am not always sure of what. And when returning to places previously visited, like Kraków, or more familiar places like my family´s country house,…

  • Hope in REKO

    Research is never the work of a single woman. Rather, it should be understood, as Donna Haraway suggests, as ‘sympoiesis’ – a “making-with”: all things become together. In this blog post, I will reflect on a sympoietic theme that emerged at the convergence of my reading of parts of the empirical material generated by members…