Slow Food as one in many a semiotic network approach to the geographical development of a social movement

Abstract

Slow Food is a global, grassroots movement aimed at enhancing and sustaining local food cultures and traditions worldwide. Since its establishment in the 1980s as a local protest movement in Italy, Slow Food evolved into a global movement composed through countless local ‘grassroots’ activities intersecting with more ‘top-down’ umbrella orchestration and framing. This paper explores the many faces of this one-in-many movement by focusing on the circulation and variation of Slow Food ideas and practices across the world. The core argument is that these ideas and practices effectively capture and steer the manifold affective moments emerging from local and network activities. The affective–effective conversions are traced here by applying a semiotic-network approach to a large corpus of Slow Food websites. Thus adopting a novel approach and methodology of tracing the geographical development of a social movement, the paper reveals both grassroots and global patterns of change and diffusion, and zooms in on specific nodes, connections and practices that play a key role in the movement’s development. In doing so, we develop a research strategy that is better able to make sense of complex and non-linear processes of geographical diffusion-innovation.