Eastern Europe and the geography of knowledge production: The case of the invisible gardener

Abstract

The article contributes to the debates in geography on the inequality of knowledge production and the context-dependent hierarchy of knowledge claims. It seeks to make sense of the invisibility, to Western academia, of East European informal food provisioning as a research topic with the potential to inform debates and theorisations regarding alternative food systems. Looking at how East European informal food practices have been read from the West is instructive for understanding how certain knowledge ‘travels’ and becomes universally accepted knowledge – or theory – or remains a partial knowledge with validity restricted to specific places and circulating within specific subfields.