Joshua Sbicca

Colorado State University | CSU · Department of Sociology

Order: https://bit.ly/2rCkJOp The United States is a nation of foodies and food activists, many of them progressives, and yet their overwhelming concern for what they consume often hinders their engagement with social justice more broadly. Food Justice Now! charts a path from food activism to social justice activism that integrates the two. It cal...

As a sustainability initiative with the backing of civil society, business, or government interests, urban agriculture can drive green gentrification even when advocates of these initiatives have the best of intentions and are aware of their exclusionary potential for urban farmers and residents. I investigate this more general pattern with the cas...

Order: http://bitly.ws/8Z3L From hipster coffee shops to upscale restaurants, a bustling local food scene is perhaps the most commonly recognized harbinger of gentrification. A Recipe for Gentrification explores this widespread phenomenon, showing the ways in which food and gentrification are deeply—and, at times, controversially—intertwined. C...

Carceral spaces—such as neighborhood zones of police surveillance and plantation prisons that exploit incarcerated labor—reflect and reproduce systems of oppression that are also present in the food system. The state regularly polices poverty instead of addressing how racial capitalism perpetuates the lack of access to basic needs like healthy food...

The United States prison system, the largest in the world, operates through both exploitative and rehabilitative modes of discipline. To gain political and public support for the extensive resources expended housing, feeding, and controlling its incarcerated population, the carceral state strategically emphasizes a mix of each mode. Agriculture in...

Every so often I come across a highly readable book that methodically reveals why food should be more central to sociological work. In Getting Something to Eat in Jackson, Joseph Ewoodzie Jr. weaves together an insightful contemporary account of the class and cultural diversity of Black life in the South told through encounters with food. Along the...

Agriculture in the United States (US), long dominated by white male interests, is rooted in entrenched structural inequalities. Prominent among them is the power of growers over a dependable low-wage racialized and gendered workforce that is disciplined with the threat of their disposability. Workers and other activists have long responded with opp...

From upscale restaurants to community gardens, food often reflects shifts in taste that are emblematic of gentrification. The prestige that food retail and urban agriculture can lend to a neighborhood helps to increase property values, fostering the displacement of long-term residents while shifting local culture to create new inclusions and exclus...

When urban agriculture becomes a sustainability initiative with institutional backing, it can drive green gentrification even when its advocates are well intentioned and concerned about the possible exclusion of urban farmers and residents. This chapter explores these tensions through the notion of an urban agriculture fix , which I apply to a case...

We have used a food intersections approach to explore the ways that gentrification is enacted and contested. Food and gentrification are certainly linked in the popular imagination; media coverage of gentrification often references food businesses like coffee shops, hip takes on working-class or ethnic cuisines, and urban farms as symbolic of a nei...

Social network analysis (SNA) is an interdisciplinary method that takes as its starting point the premise that social life is created primarily and most importantly by relations and the patterns formed by these relations. While SNA is often associated with the quantitative analysis of network measures, we illustrate through our overall mapping of,...

How do food movements prioritize and work to accomplish their varied and often conflicting social change goals at the city scale? Our study investigates the Denver food movement with a mixed methods social network analysis to understand how organizations navigate differences in power and influence vis-à-vis resource exchange. We refer to this uneve...

Women in the US have farmed for centuries, but have infrequently had the farmer title. Rural sociologists have explored women’s on-farm roles, as well as rural conceptualizations of gender that influence who can be a farmer. As the proportion of women claiming the farmer title increases, it is important to explore women farmers’ experiences. This a...

As a sustainability initiative with the backing of civil society, business, or government interests, urban agriculture can drive green gentrification even when advocates of these initiatives have good intentions and are aware of their exclusionary potential for urban farmers and residents. I investigate this more general pattern with the case of ho...

Food offers a visceral entry point into the politics and processes of gentrification. Traditional explanations of gentrification - when a neighborhood experiences disinvestment and economic decline followed by "revitalization" and "redevelopment" - hinge on either political economy or cultural drivers. This article discusses the relationship betwee...

The formation of food-labor alliances in Los Angeles pushes food justice politics beyond a focus on food access, culturally appropriate food, and self-determination by strategically emphasizing economic inequalities and working conditions and engaging in confrontational politics. These alliances reveal that it is important to have highly visible la...

Food justice scholarship utilizing racial formation theory has largely analyzed race and racism within the conventional food system and the food movement, leaving under-examined the political projects of food justice organizations to realize racial equity. This article recovers the dialectical spirit of racial formation theory, that of oppression a...

Mass incarceration entrenches racial and class inequality and segregation. Before, during, and after low-income people of color enter prison, they experience a range of barriers and biases that make it difficult to break out of the prison pipeline. This article investigates food justice and restorative justice activists in Oakland, California who a...

Researchers committed to food justice often enter communities and nonprofits with a desire to help. They often think there is a scarcity, such as food, that they want to understand and help to increase. At the same time, research obligations may lead to extracting "findings" without advancing food justice. Such actions may unintentionally work agai...

The alternative food movement encounters many structural conditions as it strives toward more environmentally sustainable and socially just agrifood systems. One of the greatest challenges the movement faces is not turning its back on migrant farmworkers at the same time it creates and experiments with alternative agricultural models. This article...

Much of the alternative food movement is predicated on a prefigurative politics of building alternatives to the conventional agrifood system, with only a smaller segment invested in a politics of confrontation with that very same system. In the context of actually existing agrifood relations, this raises a number of concerns. First, the movement of...

There is a growing commitment by different parts of the alternative food movement (AFM) to improve labor conditions for conventional food chain workers, and to develop economically fair alternatives, albeit under a range of conditions that structure mobilization. This has direct implications for the process of intra-movement building and therefore...

Cities are a locus for struggles over the ability for historically marginalized groups to feed themselves. These stratified spaces represent a distinct expression of the conventional agrifood system: the undernutrition/malnutrition paradox. By investigating the food politics of two organizations – Food Not Bombs in Orlando, FL and People’s Grocery...

We live in a contested, crisis-prone era, indicative of ongoing processes of neoliberalization. The most recent global financial and food crises have disproportionately impacted those already marginalized in society: people of colour and the working classes. The spatial expressions of this disproportionality are especially acute, evidenced by the u...

http://www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/10_1/sbicca10_1.html

The food justice movement is a budding social movement premised on ideologies that critique the structural oppression responsible for many injustices throughout the agrifood system. Tensions often arise however when a radical ideology in various versions from multiple previous movements is woven into mobilization efforts by organizations seeking to...

The focus on food within environmental justice scholarship and activism has rapidly advanced as issues such as differential access to healthy food, the distribution of hunger and obesity, and the working con-ditions of agricultural workers have garnered much deserved attention. This has spawned a new research agenda under the moniker of ''food just...

The theoretical frameworks of the treadmill of production and the treadmill of destruction are used to explore how the expansionary dynamics of capitalism and militarism, along with a complicit state apparatus, harm the environment and human health. The treadmill analysis is extended beyond a structural explanation of the occurrence of environmenta...

In an era of ecological degradation and sexual inequality it has become increasingly clear that these problems are complex. The complexity arises from the intersecting contributions of our institutions, cultures, collective imaginations, personal cognitive processes and ecological systems. At the same time, there is growing recognition among activi...