Learning farmerhood: intersectional pathways into UK agroecology

Women from urban backgrounds are increasingly taking up agricultural work in the UK. Lacking the cultural and material inheritances of family farming, their journeys are instead shaped through involvement with food activism. This paper draws on data from participant observation in agroecology movement spaces, interviewing with women farmers and food activists, and documentary analysis. It uses the lens of food pedagogies to examine the extent to which agroecology – as an activist food pedagogy – shapes resistance to and/or reproduction of gendered, classed and racialized food identities. The analysis shows how new entrants learn to become farmers and food‑growers within a pedagogical regime organized around the ideal of “setting up on the land,” a regime that reproduces middle‑class heteropatriarchal subjectivities and whiteness while also creating openings for their contestation. In this context, I introduce the concept of pedagogical labour to capture the self‑regulating and disciplinary work through which first‑generation entrants both perform farming identities and foster more inclusive agroecological spaces. The paper also raises empirical questions concerning the risks of reproducing entrenched inequalities, alongside the potential for activist pedagogies to cultivate safer and more connected intersectional spaces.