Cultivating a Community of Care: Growing Relationships through Farmers Market Exchanges CSCW011

Small-scale and alternative farming is difficult, precarious work; most small farms in the United States survive less than ten years. Yet these food systems are an important site for developing sustainable, local, and justice-based practices that can impact many of the large challenges we face today. Building on rural HCI research in the CSCW community, this paper takes an autoethnographic approach to exploring undocumented economic systems between vendors at a farmers market in the United States. We draw on Tronto’s ethical qualities of care to understand the gifting and trading of labor, goods, knowledge, and emotional support between vendors. Based on these first-hand experiences, we offer research opportunities for HCI that could support caring economic systems in communities.