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This is the website and blog of Dr John Lever.

Wednesday 12 June 2019

A Better Future – Understanding Refugee Entrepreneurship (BFURE)

BFURE Project, funded by BA/Leverhulme

In recent years, the ‘migration crisis’ in Europe has raised concerns about addressing the social and economic needs of the growing numbers of refugees arriving in the UK from countries such as Syria. The BFURE project is interested not in the costs incurred by supporting refugees, but in the skills and knowledge refugees have when they arrive in the UK, and how these skills can be harnessed to support and enable refugees to contribute to the UK economy and further social integration.

The project will explore refugees' knowledge and skills through a series of ‘Pop-up Skills Shops/Clinics’ and ‘Skill-Gap Workshops’ with local authorities, non-government agencies and refugees across West Yorkshire during 2019-2020.

Get in touch for more information.

Saturday 4 May 2019

Reconfiguring local food governance?

Lever, J., Sonnino, R. and Cheetham, F. (2019) Reconfiguring local food governance in an age of austerity: towards a place-based approach? Journal of Rural Studies

Abstract: In this paper we examine the dynamic nature of local food governance by considering the potential for (and barriers to) developing a more robust approach that can enhance the socio-ecological resilience of the food system. Fusing insights from Eliasian sociology with the literature on local food governance, we focus on a region of northern England to explore understandings of “local food” and the problems local food actors encounter while working within and across the territorial boundaries of “the local’. This is underpinned by an examination of the pressures local governments face as a result of financial austerity and competing neoliberal policy priorities that, we argue, undermine attempts to create synergies between diverse food system actors. We conclude by outlining the potential for developing a more relational approach to (and understanding of) place-based food governance.

Keywords: Figurations; governance; local food; place; relational; territorial.