Triple-rigorous Storytelling: A PI's Reflections on Devising Case Study Methods with Five Community-based Food Justice Organizations

Christine Porter

doi:10.5304/jafscd.2018.08a.008

Abstract

Case study research provides scholarly paths for storytelling, with systematic methodological guides for achieving epistemological rigor in telling true stories and deriving lessons from them. For documenting and better understanding work as complex as community organizing for food justice, rigorous storytelling may proffer one of the most suitable research methods. In a five-year action-research project called Food Dignity, leaders of five food justice community-based organizations (CBOs) and academics at four universities collaborated to develop case studies about the work of the five CBOs. In this reflective essay, the project’s principal investigator reviews methods used in other food justice case studies and outlines the case study methods used in Food Dignity. She also recounts lessons learned while developing these methods with collaborators. The community co-investigators show her that telling true stories with morals relating to justice work requires three kinds of methodological rigor: ethical, emotional, and epistemological.

Highlights

Some of the social theories and research methods I studied as a Ph.D. student seemed so intuitively obvious that academics claiming them, and often disguising them with unintuitive monikers, annoyed me
How do, can, and should U.S communities build community-led food systems that generate sustainable food security for all? These are the questions we1 posed in a community-university action, research, and education project that we called Food Dignity, for which I served as the project director and principal investigator (PI)
Extension, and education project, we propose to trace the paths taken by five US communities and to collaborate in mapping and traveling the most appropriate and effective roads forward for creating sustainable community food systems (SCFS) for food security (FS)

Summary

Introduction

Some of the social theories and research methods I studied as a Ph.D. student seemed so intuitively obvious that academics claiming them, and often disguising them with unintuitive monikers, annoyed me. I hoped it still honored the nearly infinite complexity of understanding and changing human society (which is at least as complex as understanding how those with able bodies walk, and how that ability can sometimes be recovered when it is lost). It is this scale of complexity that social science research aims to help understand and improve, including tackling the most wicked of social problems. How do, can, and should U.S communities build community-led food systems that generate sustainable food security for all? These are the questions we posed in a community-university action, research, and education project that we called Food Dignity, for which I served as the project director and principal investigator (PI)

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