933317 Organic farming in the public debate (in Eng.)


Art
Vorlesung und Seminar
Semesterstunden
2
Vortragende/r (Mitwirkende/r)
Organisation
Angeboten im Semester
Sommersemester 2022
Unterrichts-/ Lehrsprachen
Englisch

Lehrinhalt

Brief summary of the course aims:

(1) to do a science piece in one month in an interactive manner between students and students and farmer markets consumers, guided by the teachers
(2) to equip the students with methodologies and theoretical concepts and tools to critically analyze the public debates about organic farming
and
(3) to inform about the current public debates about organic farming.


Background:
Our modern agricultural and food systems are characterized by long, concentrated, and complex supply chains, and fewer but larger farms, food processors, and retailers. As a result, fewer and fewer people have direct experience with farmers, agriculture, and food production. We increasingly rely on second-hand information in the media to form our ideas about agriculture and make our choices in our modern agricultural and food system. In contrast there are alternative food movements like organic farming characterized by direct contacts and communications between all actors.

Today, most of the public debate about agriculture and alternative food and farming movements takes place in various types of mass media and social media. Besides, there are oral informal discourses and those via surveys and interviews.
In this course, our interest is to learn how to analyse the discourses on alternative food movements.

Our first methodological focus will be to learn how to study the discourses on multiple forms of organic farming via media analysis from an international perspective.

Our second methodological focus will be to apply so called dot surveys, analysing the consumers perceptions and motivations to visit organic farmer markets of the city of Vienna (will be done in German and English).

Inhaltliche Voraussetzungen (erwartete Kenntnisse)

Basic knowledge in organic agriculture is an advantage

Lehrziel

After the completion of the course students will:

• Have gained an overview about current debates about organic farming, specifically within the context of farmer markets
• Understand how mass and social media information is produced, communicated and how it influences our society and food systems
• Be able to critical analyze media information, their production and their consequences
• Be sensitive about importance of language use
• Have fostered their media literacy
• Are informed and be able on how to apply a dot survey
• Be able to analyse and interpret dot survey data
Noch mehr Informationen zur Lehrveranstaltung, wie Termine oder Informationen zu Prüfungen, usw. finden Sie auf der Lehrveranstaltungsseite in BOKUonline.