Milliken, Sarah ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7151-8753 (2026) The role of art activism in the prefigurative politics of food system transformation. In: Sareen, Siddharth and Juhola, Sirkku, (eds.) Transitions to Sustainability: The Prefigurative Politics of Present Transformation. Palgrave Studies in Environmental Transformation, Transition and Accountability (PSETTA) . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, Switzerland, pp. 385-399. ISBN 978-3032073945 (doi:10.1007/978-3-032-07395-2_25)

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Abstract

Using food system transformation as a lens, this chapter explores the common ground between art activism and prefigurative politics. Art activists that engage with food production embrace it as a tool for both aesthetic expression and political critique, by deconstructing the inequality of food systems and proposing alternative models of human interaction with the land that emphasise care, diversity, equity, justice, relationality, and sovereignty. By creating living examples of sustainable alternatives, fostering experimentation, challenging dominant systems, cultivating hope and agency, and integrating social and ecological concerns, prefigurative politics and art activism are therefore closely intertwined, influencing and complementing each other in the pursuit of social transformation. Artists can make grassroots projects visible and tangible, possible and probable, effective and meaningful, replicable and connected, local and open, while the creative process itself can be considered as a method of prefiguration, by making speculation easier to experience, to experiment with, and ultimately to enact, assembling matter into form as a capacitor of a prefigurative imaginary at work. Art activism has unique potential to engage with deep leverage points in sustainability transformations by focusing on fundamental myths, paradigms, and systems of meaning-making, and to link to structural and institutional change through chains of leverage.

Item Type:	Book Section
Uncontrolled Keywords:	art activism, prefigurative politics, food system, transformation, leverage points
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) N Fine Arts > N Visual arts (General) For photography, see TR N Fine Arts > NC Drawing Design Illustration N Fine Arts > NX Arts in general
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Law, Arts and Social Sciences Faculty of Law, Arts and Social Sciences > School of Design and Creative Industries
Last Modified:	02 Feb 2026 12:29
URI:	https://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/52369

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