Agile producers and consumer-saviours: Discourses of resilience and responsibility in Australian media coverage of artisanal food and craft

Abstract

COVID-19's supply chain disruptions saw small-scale, artisanal food and craft producers experience surges in demand from consumers seeking locally made goods. This article analyses Australian news coverage promoting this ‘turn to the local’, with a focus on mainstream news outlets from March 2020 to February 2023. We identify two dominant narratives: the ‘producer pivot’ and the ‘consumer-saviour’. Using Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad’s (2018) work on resilience as a regulatory ideal of neoliberalism, we argue that both narratives focus on individual responsibility in ways that make invisible structural and economic impediments to change. The consistent ways in which buying and producing local small-scale goods were presented and understood in the news coverage – across different products, places and stages of the pandemic – highlights the persistent ways in which neoliberal values perform particular kinds of work for capitalism by asserting the necessity of local ‘resilience’ and ‘positivity’ in times of crisis.