“Come and live in my Shoes”: Food Access and social isolation for People living in poverty IN GANANOQUE, Ontario

This community-based research project, in collaboration with the Gananoque and Area Food Access Network (GAFAN), gathered data from self-reported food insecure residents of Gananoque and area to determine how to improve their access to healthy, personally acceptable food. In March 2016, I recruited 14 participants for three focus groups and one personal interview with those struggling to put food on the table for themselves and others in the household. Participants were single parents, adults over the age of 50, and adults who could benefit from improved access to healthy food but do not currently use existing services. Health issues, social isolation, scraping by, and lack of income were four themes that underscored the impact of poverty on the lives of participants. Lack of income, transportation, cost of food, lack of affordable or accessible childcare, and inadequate access to support services proved to be major barriers to food security: strongly influenced by the impact of rurality. The results of this research have the potential to help GAFAN improve food access for those living in this community. It may also have implications for enhancing food security in other rural Canadian communities.

A Historical Materialist Approach to the Eurozone Crisis: Fictitious Capital, States, and Capital Accumulation

This dissertation examines the ongoing European sovereign debt crises that began with Greece in 2009, in the wake of the US subprime mortgage crisis. Through the application of a historical materialist approach, I attempt to understand the on-going crisis in the European Monetary Union (EMU) by investigating root causes of sovereign debt crises, relations of power, and main beneficiaries of the policy responses. My theoretical framework hinges on three contradictions in capitalism: the tendency towards overaccumulation, the tension between fictitious capital and the productive base, and the contradiction inherent in capitalist states between their role as a national state and as a class state. In contrast to the dominant positions that locate the cause of the crisis within either: debtor states; creditor states; or the framework at the EMU, I argue that these sovereign debt crises are actually a broader crisis of crisis of capitalism within the EMU itself. In order to do so, I trace the evolution of the political economy of the Eurozone in the post-Bretton woods era, with a particularly focus on the credit system. More specifically, I argue that these crises are the result of an interaction between three meso-level contradictions that have developed within the EMU region: 1) Germany’s postwar accumulation regime, which has produced a deep crisis of overaccumulation; 2) the contradictory processes associated with the neoliberal logic of the EMU, by which I mean the rush to lower barriers to credit and finance at the expense of all else; and 3) credit-fueled, consumption-based EMU integration in the periphery; and. These three contradictions came together in the wake of the 2007-2008 US subprime crisis to form an overall crisis of capitalism in the Eurozone, expressed, as I suggest, as a crisis of fictitious capital. This dissertation aims to contribute to the ongoing project among critical political economists to de-naturalize and re-politicize money, while challenging the hegemony of monetarism within neoliberalism. Second, there has yet to be a comprehensive study that examines the EMU, Germany, and the crises in the periphery from a holistic, historical materialist analysis.