Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom MovementAgricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement
Abstract
In the late 1960s, internationally renowned activist Fannie Lou Hamer purchased forty acres of land in the Mississippi Delta, launching the Freedom Farms Cooperative (FFC). A community-based rural and economic development project, FFC would grow to over 600 acres, offering a means for local sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and domestic workers to pursue community wellness, self-reliance, and political resistance. Life on the cooperative farm presented an alternative to the second wave of northern migration by African Americans--an opportunity to stay in the South, live off the land, and create a healthy community based upon building an alternative food system as a cooperative and collective effort. Freedom Farmers expands the historical narrative of the black freedom struggle to embrace the work, roles, and contributions of southern black farmers and the organizations they formed. Whereas existing scholarship generally views agriculture as a site of oppression and exploitation of black people, this book reveals agriculture as a site of resistance and provides a historical foundation that adds meaning and context to current conversations around the resurgence of food justice/sovereignty movements in urban spaces like Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York City, and New Orleans.
... Smith, 2019;K. Smith, 2004;White, 2018). Black agrarianism conceptualizes a space to express how Black people in general, particularly Black farmers and landowners, resisted white supremacy through their attachment to land, mobilization for political power, and social and economic movements to become independent and self-sufficient. ...
... Black agrarianism has deep roots, with tactics such as planting seeds in the braids of those abducted into the slave trade or gardening a small plot outside slave quarters on plantations (White, 2018). Black connections and attachment to land as good stewards have significantly expanded political, economic, and social movements (K. ...
... Historically, land ownership has been the focal point in gaining political and economic autonomy in multiple ways: political awareness through voting rights, health awareness through the construction of health centers in poverty-stricken areas, and most importantly, food sovereignty through supplying food to communities marginalized by racial hierarchies (B. Smith, 2020;White, 2018). ...
How are Black farmers experiencing agriculture today? The shadow of an egregious history for Black farmers over the last century has sought to submerge into the story behind the experiences of Black farmers today. Yet, contemporary Black farmers are reshaping the narrative beyond their demise, revitalizing their significance and what they bring to rural areas such as the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta region. This article takes a qualitative exploratory approach to examine how small-scale Black farmers in the region experience agriculture through strategies of self-reliance and autonomy. We draw on the theory of Black agrarianism to illuminate how such experiences are shaped by (1) Farm Profitability and Farm Expenses, (2) Resource Scarcity and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Farm Service Agency (FSA) Relationships, and (3) Resiliency Strategies. Our findings offer new perspectives on Black agrarianism by exploring coping strategies that uphold self-empowerment and self-sufficiency, interconnecting both tangible and intangible responses by Black farmers to agricultural, political, social, and economic inequities. While evidence shows that Black farmers in the Delta are subject to unequal treatment in the agricultural system, the legacy of Black agrarianism persists among Mississippi’s Black farmers as a testament to their resilience in the face of agricultural barriers.
... "Property" thus shapes Blackness in its many forms (Hall, 2020;Harris, 1993). Yet Black people have always used a range of land-stewardship arrangements-from marronage to farmer cooperatives-to challenge the property relations that historically defined us (White, 2018). ...
... Even so, improperty, as a concept, contextualizes this dispute, revealing that it reflects not merely interpersonal or class tensions but also the complexity of Black property ownership. This concept demands that we move beyond characterizations of Black landownership as predominantly a matter of "self-determination," "liberation," and "sovereignty" (De Jong, 2016;King et al., 2018;White, 2018), underscoring how enclosure and extraction are always proper to the property form (under racial capitalism). As a dialectic of liberation and exploitation, improperty is an inherently ephemeral and experimental configuration, offering fleeting moments of freedom and glimpses of an otherwise-this tenuousness contrasting with the alleged timelessness of settler land demarcations. ...
... Under Jim Crow, cooperatives enabled Black women to leave the domestic service of white employers and work for themselves, instilling a sense of dignity in their labor and offering some respite from everyday racism (De Jong, 2016). At the height of the civil rights movement, Fannie Lou Hamer's Freedom Farm Cooperative was a force for voting rights as Black enfranchisement expanded (White, 2018). Black people have also used more traditional forms of business ownership in civil rights struggles, repurposing their companies' products, protocols, and spaces to enable protest and organizing (Teachout, 2020). ...
The cognates proper and property have a racialized relationship: ownership rights were historically rooted in white supremacist notions of propriety. Thus, Black people's efforts to challenge these rights entail the improper: breaches of rules that render us as property and as propertyless. I ethnographically illustrate this transgression to theorize the intersection of property and the improper, or improperty: modes of ownership that paradoxically unsettle the logics of accumulation and enclosure that are proper to the property form. I introduce improperty to contextualize nascent Black land projects that are funded through the nonprofit industrial complex, online crowdsourcing, and microreparations. These projects simultaneously reproduce the capitalized relations they wish to supplant and create exciting new possibilities for decolonial land work, minimizing the dependence on commerce and the settler state that has traditionally hampered Black farms. Embracing this simultaneity can deepen our understanding of the transformative power of Black land stewardship.
... In rural communities, 30.7% of Black Americans were living in poverty in 2019, compared to 13.3% of white Americans (USDA ERS, 2021). Nevertheless, despite the ongoing social and economic inequities experienced by people of color in the South, beginning with forcible removal and enslavement, these communities have long used food production as a site for creative activism and resistance, through co-operative and regenerative farming models (Franklin et al., 2011;Leslie & White, 2018;White, 2018). ...
... Both programs within this model evolved from a community tradition of growing food and sharing it between neighbors, and they continue to source food locally by purchasing directly from farmers, receiving donations from local farms and individuals, and gleaning. Local sourcing requires time and effort to build relationships and rapport, but it can extend program benefits by building the resilience of the local food economy (McEntee & Naumova, 2016;White, 2018). Support Model programs are driven by the goal of serving the community by filling gaps with local resources and capacity. ...
... Nevertheless, these programs-five of which align with either the Restructuring or Market models-have embraced small-scale farming as a source of resilience-as-resistance and self-determination (Penniman, 2018;Reese, 2019;White, 2018). The founder of Program 12 describes this tension between positive and negative perspectives on farming in a published interview (Toner, 2016): I didn't have a good experience with the soil growing up. ...
The Southeastern United States was built upon agriculture, but paradoxically its rural residents experience high rates of food insecurity due to numerous intersecting socio-economic barriers. Food insecurity leads to higher rates of diet-related chronic disease in rural populations compared to their urban counterparts, further compounded by limited access to healthcare. Guided by the theoretical frameworks of assets-based community development and the culture-centered approach, this paper investigates existing program models that guide the establishment of community-derived programs to increase the availability and accessibility of locally sourced fruit and vegetables for low-income residents of the rural Southeast. Data were collected through document analysis and semi-structured interviews with leadership from twelve community-derived food access programs in Appalachia and the Deep South. Using a framework approach, data were analyzed to identify and characterize current models based on their structures and guiding values. Four program models were identified: the Charity Model, the Support Model, the Restructure Model, and the Market Model, which range from providing emergency food to restructuring the local food system. We present characteristics of each model, the challenges faced, and lessons learned by participating programs. In addition to identifying the four models, an unexpected result of this work was uncovering subtle yet important differences between Appalachian and Deep South programs that reflect their divergent, yet parallel cultural histories of marginalization and resilience.
... Together, they explain processes of how people think, decide, and act together to determine what is best for the community as a whole. The collection of items that loaded onto this factor almost entirely capture the following strategies of resistance outlined in Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement: Commons as Praxis, Prefigurative Politics, and Economic Autonomy (White, 2018). For example, item 25 says, "my community openly shares our goods and resources with one another." ...
... This 41item scale is made up of five subdomains: Collective Self-determination, Embodied Earth Care and Connection, BodyMind Community Care, Landbased Spiritual Wellbeing, and Ubuntu. It was developed based on what I and others (White, 2018) heard from Black and Brown urban growers in our communities. The Agricultural Community Power Scale (AgCPS) is one of few instruments to describe Embodied Earth Care and Connection, Land-based Spiritual Wellbeing, Ubuntu/Interdependence, and Collective Self-determination. ...
Participation in community farming and gardening increases and improves social support, collective agency, care, and resistance in many historically exploited communities. Black- and Brown-led food justice organizations have expressed the need for an instrument that captures what is most important to them: information on how their programs impact land-based knowledge, spirituality, collective agency, resistance, and mental health. This study used a survey instrument to develop a scale using exploratory factor analysis. Participants were recruited with the help of key partners and influencers from U.S.-based agricultural networks. The final analyzable sample contained 363 respondents. The scree plot, parallel test, and eigenvalues all supported a five-factor structure as most appropriate for the data. These five inter-related factors explain a concept called “Agricultural Community Power” and refer to Collective Self-determination, BodyMind Community Care, Land-based Spiritual Wellbeing, Embodied Earth Care and Connection, and Ubuntu/Interdependence. This model had adequate internal consistency reliability (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.93). The Agriculture Community Power Scale (AgCPS) is a tool that (1) can be used for program evaluation and (2) is better aligned with the values, priorities, and impacts of many community-rooted environmental organizations. AgCPS moves food justice evaluation away from standard metrics (such as BMI and fruit and vegetable consumption) and toward metrics of community care, collective agency, land-based spirituality, and community power.
... The mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organiser, "permanent persuader" and not just a simple orator … One of the most important characteristics of any group that is developing towards dominance is its struggle to assimilate and to conquer "ideologically" the traditional intellectuals, but this assimilation and conquest is made quicker and more efficacious the more the group in question succeeds in simultaneously elaborating its own organic intellectuals. (Gramsci 1971, 9-10) Elaborating the dynamics of political organisation and organic intellectuals has generated a range of rich scholarship (Akram-Lodhi 2022; Ekers et al. 2013;Gordon 2015;Hall et al. 2013;Hall, Lumley, and McLennan 1977;Hart 2013;Mayer 2001;Montenegro de Wit 2017;Ody and Shattuck 2023;Sekyi-Otu 1996;White 2018). Gramsci's analysis has mattered across a range of contexts. ...
... Building on the foundation of intersectionality theory, these studies by White (2018), Smith II (2019), Tavenner and Crane (2019), and Tavenner et al. (2022) collectively advance the field of intersectional agriculture by illustrating how intersectionality functions as both a theoretical lens and a practical framework. These scholars move beyond exploring gender dynamics in isolation, extending their analyses to the broader social structures (such as race, class, and socio-economic status) that shape and influence agricultural systems. ...
Urban farms and gardens provide critical economic, social, and environmental benefits, yet they remain shaped by historical and systemic inequities that disproportionately disadvantage Black women agriculturalists. This article examines how long-standing racialized land dispossession, discriminatory policies, and exclusion from financial and institutional support continue to restrict Black women’s access to land and agricultural resources in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (USA). Using in-depth interviews and photovoice data, the study demonstrates how these systemic barriers, rooted in historical racial discrimination and reinforced through contemporary urban agriculture policies, undermine Black women’s ability to sustain viable farming operations. Findings demonstrate that while Black women actively engage in urban agriculture, they remain marginalized within the sector, lacking the same access to land tenure, financial capital, and training opportunities afforded to white growers. These findings build on Black feminist thought, illustrating the systemic and interconnected nature of inequity and discrimination in urban agriculture. The research also contributes to the growing field of intersectional agriculture by centering the voices and experiences of Black women agriculturalists and emphasizing the urgent need for equity-focused policies and practices that address systemic barriers while fostering community resilience and empowerment. This study underscores the need for urban agriculture to be understood as a land justice issue, advocating for policies that confront racialized land dispossession, counteract gentrification-induced displacement, and provide targeted financial and structural support for Black women agriculturalists to ensure sustainable and just urban food systems.
... Sustainable agriculture and food systems education must reckon with the violent history of agriculture and work toward healing and liberation on the land. For example, a decolonized food system education engages with the violent history of slavery and simultaneously draws attention to how our culinary diversity is the result of cultural survival embedded in the seeds brought from Africa (White 2018). The care seed keepers bestowed upon those seeds, as they adapted to new conditions amidst the violence of slavery, cannot be understated. ...
What would happen if we were to flip traditional pedagogies of teaching sustainable agriculture on their head? In other words, what would happen if sustainable agriculture education shifted from one that focuses on techniques, to one that focuses on healing. Many students who attend Minority Serving Institutions embody the consequences of a broken food system. Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and asthma are more common in minority communities and are often linked to the industrial food system. Therefore, teaching students who have experiences of living with low food access, have had family members lose jobs because the drought has closed the farm, or have relatives with forms of cancer that can be traced back to contaminated drinking water requires a form teaching that is less concerned about what content to teach and more vested in providing students pathways to heal. This paper explores how experiential learning and healing can be fertile grounds to develop a transformative agroecology that pushes student awareness, engagement, and motivations for sustainable agriculture into new and exciting directions.
... There are also examples of land trusts being utilized by innovative groups such as the Cooperation Humboldt in Northern California and Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi, who hold racial justice as their central values and are led by BIPOC leaders, serving as a model that agricultural land trusts could better examine (Vassell and Cobb 2021; Cooperative Jackson 2025). Further, cooperative farming projects led by BIPOC and immigrant farmers, include the historic Freedom Farms Cooperative, as well as the currently active Federation of Southern Cooperatives, Soul Fire Farm in New York, The New Roots Cooperative Farm in Maine, and Tierra y Libertad Farm in Washington state, have shown the possibilities for these models to thrive across the country, in spite of the lack of broader support (White 2018;Gilbert 2002). ...
This article looks at the conditions and challenges for immigrant Latinx workers and farmers in accessing farmland in the United States. As white farmers retire in large numbers, and competing interests look to buy up swaths of American farmland for consolidation, investment, and development, newer groups of farmers struggle with finding and purchasing land at affordable prices. In the context of this land market affordability gap, there is increasing interest among Latinx farmworkers and farmers to utilize their knowledge and experience and establish their own farm businesses, yet they are limited in their ability to purchase land. This article looks at the historic conditions of racialized inequality in U.S. agriculture, how Latinx farmers are left behind today, and what recommendations have been made to address this inequality, from policy, to market-based programs, to more systemic land reform. Starting with a discussion of the exclusion of Latinx and other immigrants of color from agrarian land ownership and ending with an assessment of current recommendations, this paper provides an overview of the struggles being faced by this promising group of U.S. agriculturalists.
... Inspired by the work of Malik Yakini and the Detroit Black Food Sovereignty Network (White, 2018), the FLFPC decided to conduct a visioning session to strategize its future. After this meeting, the FLFPC decided to pursue a JEDI approach, which meant revaluating every aspect of the organization and implementing a renewed commitment to accountability, equity, and inclusivity in its general public membership, FLFPC Board, and staff. ...
This reflective essay provides insights from a pilot, public-facing virtual course, Introduction to Food Policy, that was developed and delivered in summer 2022. Building on interest and efforts in Florida in urban agriculture, agroecology, and fostering more equitable food systems through food sovereignty principles, the University of South Florida Food Sovereignty Initiative and the Florida Food Policy Council collaborated on constructing and delivering this introductory course, which was accessible to students, community members and policy makers. Over a six-week period, the pilot course featured weekly presentations from food system specialists in the areas of (1) understanding food policy, (2) researching food policy, (3) environmental food policy, (4) food policy advocacy, (5) civic engagement with food policy formulation, and (6) regional food policy. In this reflection, the authors, a collective of leadership of the Florida Food Policy Council and faculty from the Food Sovereignty Initiative, offer insights about the process of creating the course, delivering the weekly lectures, and some overall concluding observations. We include participant comments from a post-course survey and an outside evaluation from the North American Food Systems Network. This reflection is intended to help strengthen the evidence base in the literature on community-based collaborative educational interventions related to food sovereignty and related food policy issues. It serves as an example of how a locally organized, virtual educational intervention has the potential for local and national influence on food policy awareness.
... These also rebuild resilient food systems adapted to the changing needs of particular environments and communities (Bosco and Thomas, 2023;Herron, 2018;Penniman, 2018). In the United States, Black agrarian and farming activism like Fannie Lou Hamer's Freedom Farms, have emphasized collective land ownership, labor reform, and social justice (Du Bois, 1904;McCutcheon, 2019;Quisumbing King et al., 2018;White, 2018). Similarly, settler farmers who reject that they are destined to reproduce racist or gendered hierarchies such as North American Jewish agrarians (Goldberg et al., 2024), landless Brazilian workers (Meek, 2020), queer Midwest farmers (Wypler, 2019), or Australian peasant collectives (Jonas and Gressier, 2024), consider how an agricultural society can move forward without consolidation and extraction. ...
In this paper, we describe links between skilling, the social, environmental, and didactic process by which farmers learn and adapt knowledge; and social reproduction, the work of continually creating the relations and institutions of the political economy. Skilling is always contextual: the ways that people learn on farms are shaped through the ecological possibilities of their space, the political economies in which they do agricultural work, local networks of inclusion and exclusion, and the institutions through which they work and live. Social reproduction theory considers how class is continually formed and labor differentiated. On farms, the work people do also continually creates a physical environment: the stage on which agricultural skill is performed. As such, social reproduction theory can describe not only how institutions create conditions that facilitate skilling but also how they reproduce worlds that inhibit it. This paper illustrates these connections between skill and social reproduction by examining how they intersect with the classic peasant model of agricultural decision-making, the colonial legacy of plantation agriculture, and the deskilling factory model of capitalist agriculture.
... Similarly, Black ecology underscores the ongoing legacies of environmental racism and seeks to reclaim land, nature, and environmental knowledge from which Black communities have been historically alienated (Dillon 2018a(Dillon , 2018bFinney 2014;M. White 2018). As Finney (2014) notes, "the environment is not just about 'wilderness' or remote natural areas, but the everyday places that shape and define cultural experiences" (p. 22). Black placemaking in parks, community gardens, and other urban green spaces exemplifies this understanding, highlighting how environmental engagement is as much ab ...
This paper examines the racialized dimensions of urban green spaces in the United States, foregrounding how structural racism, historical exclusion, and ongoing inequities converge to shape public parks and other recreational areas. While classic urban sociological theories—exemplified by the Chicago School—have illuminated the economic and political forces underpinning urbanization, they have largely neglected race as a central axis of analysis, overlooking how systemic discrimination circumscribes access to and cultural engagement with green spaces. By charting the historical displacement of Black communities—such as Seneca Village during the construction of Central Park—and the modern phenomenon of “green gentrification,” the paper exposes how ostensibly inclusive public parks have long functioned as instruments of social control and dispossession. To address these omissions, this paper employs the framework of Black placemaking to highlight the agency, resistance, and cultural creativity with which Black communities navigate and transform urban green spaces. Drawing on scholarship in Black geographies and Black ecology, the analysis underscores how marginalized groups reclaim land and cultivate collective belonging in spite of oppressive planning practices and racialized policing. Rather than accepting public green spaces as neutral or apolitical, Black placemaking demonstrates that they are contested terrain shaped by power relations, yet open to creative reimagining. By centering Black placemaking within urban sociology, this paper calls for a more nuanced, intersectional account of how race, class, and space intersect in the production of urban green environments, urging scholars and policymakers alike to recognize and support practices that foster greater equity and inclusion.
... Tomes of research on poverty, economic development, and various scales of human mobility have documented the relative inability of marginalized populations to gain access to more prosperous places characterized by higher development, higher pay, and more material resources. For instance, historical geographies of forced migration, chattel slavery, residential segregation, and economic exclusion, especially in the Southern and Northern US, have shaped the opportunity structures for Black Americans and resulted in widening Black-White income gaps (O'Connell et al., 2020;Tribble, 1996;White, 2018). Populations indigenous to the US continue to experience the influence of state control and economic exclusion. ...
Economic complexity (EC) measures the diversification and domestic comparative advantage of industry in an economy. Originally applied to studies of global economic development, dominant frameworks suggest the extent of a place’s economic capabilities underlies its economic and population growth potential, and ascribe to the universalistic notion that economic growth generates population growth. Limited research has extended the observed linkages between EC and economic and population growth in a subnational context, focusing solely on metropolitan/micropolitan contexts and neglecting potential spatialized forces that might promote variation in the relationship, especially in rural areas. After computing EC estimates for Commuting Zones (CZs), a typology inclusive of metropolitan, micropolitan, and non-metropolitan areas, we use spatial modeling techniques to investigate whether economic complexity relates to population growth and net in-migration uniformly by rurality and for ethnoracial groups. In contrast to universalistic assumptions and our expectations that complexity would be less predictive of growth in non-metro contexts, we find that higher EC more strongly associates with population growth and net in-migration in non-metro contexts. Our findings also suggest that there is a racial dimension to EC, with higher EC CZs experiencing net-inflows of White populations and net-outflows of Asian, Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous populations. Study results suggest spatially and racially disparate implications of regional economic growth and development, challenging conventional assumptions of the widely distributed benefits of economic development on less resourced ethnoracial groups, especially in non-metro contexts.
... Within Michael Burawoy's (2005) formulation, public sociology, or organic community-engaged work, is related to policy sociology and efforts to translate sociological knowledge for larger publics. While policy sociology is less community-centered than public sociology, it reflects sociologists' real efforts to affect the real world and is visible in the Manza and Uggen 2008;White 2018;Wingfield 2023). These public-facing sociologists, whether building insights from big data, archival sources, or ethnographies, encourage us to consider how to better the world through our research. ...
In her ASA presidential address, Misra calls for making solution-oriented, community-engaged, and participatory research more central in the discipline. She argues that solution-oriented work can strengthen the discipline, clarifying the promise and importance of sociology. She first discusses how sociologists engage in solution-oriented work that they communicate publicly. She then uses her collaborative work to suggest how to design research geared toward solving social problems. She emphasizes how feminist and decolonial methods that bring sociological researchers into collaborative and participatory partnerships with broader communities can develop transformative solutions, building communities of hope, justice, and joy. After discussing sociological approaches that empower communities, she emphasizes recognizing, valuing, and centering community-engaged research in the discipline.
... And while the above examples are well-known among many farmers, advocates, and academic researchers, discrimination within USDA also runs deeper than these high-profile cases. This includes histories of the FSA County Committee system being used to maintain white control of farmland alongside the heirs property system (Daniel, 2013;Gilbert et al., 2002), and the offering of agricultural extension services at locations that can be difficult to access by farmers without easy transportation and/or in environments that require access to and comfort in white-dominated spaces (Penniman, 2018;White, 2018). ...
Urban agriculture (UA) has long been practiced in the U.S. by socially disadvantaged and low-income people for the purposes of subsistence, community and resilience. Government support for UA, however, has waxed and waned, including in city and federal policy. The 2018 farm bill established the Office of Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production (OUAIP) with the mission to encourage and promote “urban, indoor, and other emerging agricultural practices” (Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018, Title XII, Sec. 12302). The inclusion of UA in federal agriculture policy was a welcome change for many urban farmers and gardeners who had long sought recognition of urban production. Yet, historical discriminatory policies and practices on the part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) have led some farmers and advocates to be wary of the department, and may suggest reticence to engage with USDA programs. This brief shares key findings and policy recommendations from a study that sought to understand the roll-out of the OUAIP and connected programs through a racial equity lens. We used a multimethod data collection approach that included national surveys of UA stakeholders; in-depth interviews with UA stakeholders in two case study cities, New York City and Atlanta; informational interviews with Urban Service Center (USC) Leadership in cities with urban county USDA Farm Service Agency (FSA) offices; GIS mapping of publicly accessible data; review of relevant policy documents; and participant observation, including meetings of the federal-level Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production Advisory Committee (UAIPAC). The study was supported through the Socially Disadvantaged Farmers and Ranchers Policy Research Center (The Policy Center) at Alcorn State University. In this policy brief, we introduce the urban agriculture provisions in the 2018 farm bill in the context of historical discrimination within the USDA. We then provide a short overview of our 2023–2024 study exploring the establishment and outreach of these provisions among Socially Disadvantaged Farmers and Ranchers (SDFRs) urban stakeholders followed by the key findings. We conclude with a set of policy recommendations, and reflection on how these recommendations may be relevant in 2025 and beyond.
... Anthropologists document the ways in which people practice opposition to what some have called 'plantationocene' or 'capitalocene', terms proposed as historically and contextually situated modifications of the term 'Anthropocene' to emphasise that the responsibility for planetary damage is unevenly distributed(Haraway 2016;Sapp Moore and Arosoaie 2022). They have explored histories of cooperative farming adhering to notions of wellness and self-reliance and thus away from capitalist models that promote reliance on food produced elsewhere(Reese 2019;White 2018). Anthropologists have also focused on examples of human and morethan-human resistance to mono-crops and their scalar logic(Beilin and Suryanarayanan 2017). ...
... "Freedom" in the form of legislative measures and widespread liberation movements ultimately led to hopes of amelioration, food sovereignty, and optimism among previously enslaved peoples. However, strategic disputes over land ownership rights, limited economic opportunities and performative replacements for slavery, like sharecropping and land leasing, allowed systemic oppression to persist (Johnson, 1984;Merem, 2006;White, 2018). Post-liberation movements further shaped Caribbean communities and exacerbated economic imbalances that perpetuated a socioeconomic segregation between racial and ethnic island groups. ...
Despite being a world-class tourist destination, the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI—St. Thomas, St. Croix, and St. John) face significant challenges related to diversified crop production, food distribution, and food security. High poverty rates among islanders perpetuated by historical iniquities, frequent hurricane damage, drought, poor soil quality, high food production costs, and limited food distribution networks are just a few of the challenges residents face. Consequently, 97% of the food consumed in the USVI is imported. Frequent hurricane damage, such as the recent damage from Irma and Maria (back-to-back Category 5 storms that hit the islands in 2017) complicated these challenges even more and disrupted food import processes. This manuscript focuses on a case study involving a literature review, participant observation, and a series of semi-structured, face-to-face interviews with key informants about issues related to food insecurity, resilience, and farmer needs regarding business sustainability. The results highlight how the political, economic, and cultural complexities of the USVI stymie efforts to lower barriers related to food accessibility and affordability. The results also reveal a new and vibrant entrepreneurial spirit among native islanders and transplants alike, providing novel entryways into food system change and development. Finally, we share policy implications and next steps toward building agriculture and food system resiliency.
... For over five centuries in the United States (US), settler colonists and colonizing institutions have attempted to erase Indigenous bodies, knowledge, and foodways (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2015). As recently as 158 years ago, enslaved Black people grew the majority of America's food; until the 1930s, formerly enslaved Black people and their descendants farmed as sharecroppers in relative debt-slavery (White and Redmond, 2019;Myers, 2022). Today, Black farmers constitute a minute fraction of their prior landholdings. ...
Higher education institutions can play an essential role in preparing students to participate in movements for just and sustainable food systems change. For the past two decades, many United States land-grant universities (LGUs) have developed food systems education (FSE) courses. This study examined the extent to which FSE courses employ four capacities deemed crucial by the FSE literature: multidimensional approaches, interdisciplinarity, centering equity, and training students to take action in food systems. The syllabi of 171 undergraduate courses at 20 LGUs were obtained by contacting instructors, and their course descriptions and learning outcomes were analyzed. This subset of LGUs were identified from the membership list of the Menus of Change University Research Collaborative (MCURC), a nationwide network of colleges using campus dining halls and classrooms as living laboratories for food systems change. Most course descriptions and learning outcomes exhibited multidimensional approaches and interdisciplinarity. However, many failed to incorporate teaching content and practices that help students critically examine equity and social justice issues in food systems, or engage in transformative change. LGUs have both the resources and urgent responsibility to empower students to be part of movements to transform unjust, unsustainable food systems. The findings of this study, and an accompanying open-access syllabus website, aim to accelerate the development of FSE curricula that prepare students to change food systems.
... If Congress expanded the program eligibility, it would allow cooperatives access to upfront financial investments. This could lead to selfsustaining systems and economic autonomy for urban agricultural cooperatives (White, 2018). ...
Urban agriculture has flourished in American cities under the care of communities, but its growing popularity faces a number of challenges related to scant funding, insecure land tenure, and environmental pollution. Both local and national policy in the U.S. have struggled to adequately address those challenges and meet the demand for fresh food, local production spaces, and resilient communities. In this policy brief, we explore an emerging apparatus to support urban agriculture in the U.S. Department of Agriculture: The Office of Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production. We describe the relationship between urban agriculture’s many benefits and future funding, technical assistance, and data collection initiatives through this office. Specifically, we call for consistent, permanent funding that is not subject to the annual federal budget process, which could power more tailored technical assistance programs, reformed granting initiatives, and expanded data collection to inform future policy and practice. Urban agriculture has the potential to transform communities and the future of farming, and federal policy has the potential to provide important support for this transformation. The policies outlined here offer a roadmap for this support.
... To be sure, Black-led mass struggles around food are not new, and therefore the food justice movement is located within a genealogy of Black food activism. Such activism includes the rural land-based work of Fannie Lou Hamer's Freedom Farms in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta and the urban-based food projects administered by the Black Panther Party (Potorti, 2017;Smith II, 2019b;White, 2018). In her interview, activistorganizer Dara Cooper (2015) argues that Black people must understand the genealogy of Black food activism "and be undeterred, and reclaim and support Black radical resistance" (p. ...
The August 2014 murder of unarmed Black teenager Michael Brown at the hands of the police in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, USA, sparked international attention, ignited a surge in #BlackLivesMatter protests, and reconfigured national discussions about race, police brutality, and state-sanctioned violence. Black food activists on the frontlines of the food justice movement grappled with Brown’s murder by joining together on a national call to address the question: What does Ferguson mean for the food justice movement? Answers to this question manifested into the 2015–2016 special digital series entitled “What Ferguson Means for the Food Justice Movement,” published online in the Food Justice Voices section of the WhyHunger organization website. In this article, we use a qualitative critical content analysis of the series to examine how Black food activists reframed agricultural and food systems in the context of the Ferguson struggle. We draw on intersectional agriculture theory to illuminate how Black food activists draft visions of food justice through three intersecting pathways: (1) critical Black agrarianism, (2) radical Black mothering, and (3) Black futures. Our research reveals that Black visions of food justice in the wake of Ferguson are instructive and offer a fresh lens to understand the evolving landscape of Black food activism, given a set of racial, gendered, social, political, and economic realities. We conclude with a brief discussion on how these visions compel us to reconsider racial equity at the nexus of agriculture, food, and various forms of unrest in Black communities, providing insights for scholars, practitioners, and activists who work on issues of food justice.
... When Romy Opperman (2020b) wrote, "We need histories of radical Black ecology now," she did not mean that those histories did not exist, only that we have not learned them. This could refer to any number of proactive Black ecological histories from the communities of maroons (1600s-1800s) to the regenerative agriculture of George Washington Carver in the early 1900s (Chesney, 2007;Favini, 2018;Reddix-Smalls, 2022 (Bhardwaj, 2023;Heynen, 2018, p. 244;Jordan et al., 2009;McCutcheon, 2019;Penniman, 2018;Ramanujam, 2023;Taylor, 2011, p. 284;White, 2019). We could even include the Black Panther's free breakfast program and work by the largely Puerto-Rican based organization, Young Lords, founded in 1969, who engaged in campaigns around urban health and lead poisoning in New York within the purview of Black ecology (Enck-Wanzer, 2010;Heynen, 2009;Patel, 2012). ...
... As with its community gardens and food-resilience initiatives, the NEHRC embraces a relationship to land that explicitly incorporates many principles of the Black farming movement as "an act of defiance against white supremacy and a means to honor the agricultural ingenuity of our ancestors" (Penniman, 2018, p. 8; see also White, 2019). The turn toward rain gardens expresses a similar frustration with the white-supremacist legacies of technopolitical flood control and recovery, legacies that have safeguarded some neighborhoods of Houston while sacrificing others. ...
In northeast Houston, a community organization is experimenting with building green infrastructure, beginning with rain gardens. In doing so, the project's participants are engaging in what might be called “infrastructural citizenship.” This form of citizenship uses “civil power” to defy white‐supremacist legacies of technopolitical flood control, which have made northeast Houston one of the most heavily flooded parts of the city. Yet infrastructural citizenship also expresses commitments beyond stormwater management, taking aim at inherited infrastructural logics and traditions associated with other norms of US petroculture (e.g., spatialized and racialized environmental toxicity, translocal supply chains). In contrast to the default petrosolidarity that ensnares the Global North (and much of the Global South), initiatives like the rain garden project evince a growing geosolidarity with the land and its capacities. Such a politics can challenge both a racist petrostate and the conditions of ecological emergency that it perpetrates.
... This provoked and extraordinary response from the FBI, who considered them an "invidious poison" and sent in the police to ransack clinics and kitchens [132][133][134]. Both the FBI, generally in favour of white Christian nationalism, and the Black Panther movement must have realised that nurturing the revolution has to be done first to fight oppression as have subsequent healthy food justice, (black)farming, horticultural and stockholding movements forming geographies and fields of freedom [135][136][137][138]. ...
Pellagra is caused by nictotinamide, the precursor to NAD, dietary deficiency. Pellagrins suffer from poor cognitive and social skills and was cured with nicotinamide (vitamin B3). Before then pellagrins were considered inferior and dangerous degenerates known as the “Butterfly Caste” after the diagnostic sunburn rash—Casal’s necklace. Subclinical pellagra is an effect and a cause of poverty, social inequality gaps and friction. Dehumanising diets becomes a justification for ostracising or killing people paving the way to an even worse diet in vicious cycles that lead to war and pandemics. Livestock farming and meat for the rich has been an enduring “megatrend” over the last 6–8000 years and acquiring the necessary resources, such as pastureland, is behind colonisation and trade wars. A consequence is NAD—disadvantaged “inferior” people. This would be cost-effective to correct and create a safer world by reducing (civil) war, and migration, and by improving health and wealth reducing risk of pandemics in a more ecologically sustainable world.
In this book, Dana Simmons explores the enduring production of hunger in US history. Hunger, in the modern United States, became a technology—a weapon, a scientific method, and a policy instrument. During the nineteenth century, state agents and private citizens colluded in large-scale campaigns of ethnic cleansing using hunger and food deprivation. In the twentieth century, officials enacted policies and rules that made incarcerated people, welfare recipients, and beneficiaries of foreign food aid hungry by design, in order to modify their behavior. With the advent of ultraprocessed foods, food manufacturers designed products to stimulate cravings and consumption at the expense of public health. Taking us inside the labs of researchers devoted to understanding hunger as a biological and social phenomenon, On Hunger examines the continuing struggle to produce, suppress, or control hunger in America.
Extension’s evolving role in urban food production will require intensive reflexivity and ongoing collaboration. Extension educators around the country have already made progress in engaging with both the social and horticultural sides of urban agriculture. Designed appropriately, urban food systems hold the potential for healthy food access, community and environmental resilience, and economic prosperity (Rangarajan & Riordan 2019). Moving forward, we offer recommendations for Extension staff to apply within their institutions and beyond. Specifically, we urge Extension to prioritize the following: 1) mediate the rural/urban dichotomy, 2) tackle structural and institutional power dynamics, and 3) intensify strategies for community resilience.
Growing Hope takes a closer look at how such narratives can carry the promise of a better future in the face of grim realities. It brings together two kinds of narratives that are rarely considered in conjunction: stories about urban community gardening and stories about vegan food justice. It shows that there is much common ground between these movements and that the stories told by them are worth exploring as part of a larger narrative about creating a better and more equitable future. In the United States, this is especially true for the stories told by and about people of color and their historically marginalized communities. Employing an econarratological approach informed by critical food studies, environmental justice ecocriticism, and transmedia studies, Growing Hope explores a selection of narratives about people who fight against food injustice and the ideologies sustaining it: stories about defiant gardening and culinary self-empowerment.
This article examines ecological restoration as a possible transformative and reparative practice amid ongoing colonial racial capitalist environmental destruction. While restoration—traditionally focused on repairing damaged landscapes—has increasingly recognized the importance of Indigenous knowledges, community engagement, and environmental justice, this article brings together critiques of normative restoration and critical discussions on reparations to locate environmental restoration within a broader ecology of reparations, or repair, for colonial violence that has disproportionately hurt Indigenous and Black communities. We consider how ideas and activities focused on “reparation ecology” offer new terrain upon which to foreground the interconnectedness of ecological and social repair through land rights, relationality, epistemic diversity, and solidarity. Drawing on case studies across geographies, we highlight how ecological restoration is at a crossroads for either internalizing or confronting injustices perpetrated through colonization and racism.
This chapter introduces the concept of ‘interculturality regimes’ as structured frameworks for managing cultural diversity within societies and international orders. Interculturality regimes integrate regulatory mechanisms that shape cultural interactions, balancing inclusivity with governance imperatives. Drawing on revisited critical histories such as the Ottoman Empire’s code of Millet and the Lifan Yuan system of Qing China, the chapter highlights the political configuration of cultural diversity and its role in legitimising authority. It explores the dual processes of ‘interpellation’ and ‘counter-interpellation’, where dominant power structures and marginalised groups contest authorised forms of cultural expression. The chapter underscores the political dimensions of culture, illustrating how cultural beliefs and values underpin governance practices, power dynamics, and the governmentalisation of social relations.
Keywords: Interculturality regimes, Cultural diversity, Political authority, Interpellation, Counter-interpellation, Cultural legitimisation, Governance
https://www.routledge.com/The-Concise-Routledge-Encyclopaedia-of-New-Concepts-for-Interculturality/Dervin-Rboul-Chen/p/book/9781032816005?srsltid=AfmBOorDRevJ3hiW0wuyONY0cKWIPtKnoHILR855X4fjBTSTFT-0ih-5
Pervasive carceral conditions are being met with a range of efforts to make what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “freedom as a place.” What does it mean to create such places? We answer here by taking seriously the methodological demands of how we do abolition work in the academy. Abolition methodologies entail a responsibility to bridge the spaces between academic and community work focused on resisting and building alternatives to carcerality. Taking our lead from organizers embedded in communities of practice and care, we see abolition methodologies as an opportunity to pursue a range of artistic, educational, and politically strategic scholar and scholar-activist works. Inspired by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s understanding that refusals can offer imaginative alternatives, we present four principles of abolitionist methodologies grounded in generative acts of refusal. These include abolition as reorientation, as contextual, as livingness, and as relational. To illustrate these principles in action, we discuss our efforts in the Prison Agriculture Lab to develop creative works and beneficial tools that, we hope, will help upend racial capitalism and advance the practice of abolition in daily life.
Consequences of food insecurity include illness, poor cognitive development, and increased behavioral problems. Policies put in place on a macro-community level, including the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Act, were enacted to increase food security, but have fallen short due to the lack of lucidity and promotion to businesses. A more influential approach could be focused on analysis at the community level. Research also shows community gardens are beneficial in promoting food security, diversifying dietary consumption and for greater self-sufficiency in food. The purpose of this research is to identify how hard and soft resources, or lack thereof, interact creating new resources, restraints, and barriers. In doing this we seek to uncover how interactions differ depending on life-stage, e.g., how these differing resources relate to food production and positionality in food climate. Auto-ethnographic data was analyzed using holistic content analysis from three different researchers at the undergraduate, early career Ph.D., and tenured Ph.D. levels. Researchers recorded interactions with food from a garden. Holistic content analysis was used to allow everyone’s experience to be viewed for commonalities, life stage impact comparisons, and other interpretations of common experiences. This research found five major trends: guilt; consumer; time constraints; food processing comfort; and culinary knowledge level. Findings from this study can be used to understand how to best modify the Everybody Eats research collaborative community resources and interventions, as well as broader recommendations for community outreach.
This paper explores the role of school and community gardens, as examples of urban agriculture projects, in fostering connections between high school students and the community. This exploratory study focuses on positive youth development and social justice youth development frameworks especially food insecurity or inability to access affordable and nutritious food. On that account, this paper examines the following research questions: (a) What effect, if any, do school gardens have on high school students’ positive youth development and community building skills? (b) How does participating in a school garden foster youth social justice awareness? The study employed a mixed-methods approach, specifically a case study method. The setting for this case study was an urban high school that maintained a garden on its grounds in Ontario, Canada. Participants included 24 high school students, 1 teacher, 1 principal, and 2 garden coordinators. The primary sources of data include (1) semi-structured interviews with students, teacher, school principal, and garden coordinators; (2) student survey responses; and (3) school garden observations. Findings show impact of the school garden on students’ positive youth development (competence, confidence, connection, character, caring, and compassion), community building skills, and social justice awareness (self-awareness, social awareness, and global awareness). As well, garden activities were linked to students’ cultural backgrounds. This research advances knowledge about school gardens as a setting that nurtures students’ environmental stewardship and establishes community connections in a way that is inclusive for students from all backgrounds.
Understanding how activities in natural settings, such as gardening, improve health and well‐being is important for designing nature‐based health interventions.
Our study focused on a sociodemographic‐diverse group of new gardeners (n = 34) who had participated for one season in the community gardens as part of the Denver Urban Gardens initiative in Denver, CO USA. New gardeners participated in semi‐structured qualitative interviews to determine how and why gardening influenced their well‐being. Interview transcripts were analysed iteratively using grounded theory and comparative case study methodologies.
Analysis revealed that new gardeners' previous gardening experience, social support systems and overcoming gardening challenges increased gardening engagement and improved outcomes. Within‐garden outcomes that were nearly universally experienced by new gardeners included food production, physical activity in the garden and a ‘gardening triad’: (1) caretaking, nurturance or love and sense of responsibility for garden plants; (2) feelings of accomplishment, success and pride and (3) connection to nature including appreciation, restoration and wonder.
We found that the elements of the ‘gardening triad’ were meaningful to gardeners and connected to both continued engagement of participants and others in the garden, and social and emotional well‐being outcomes including new and/or strengthened social relationships; purpose and meaning; self‐learning, self‐worth and confidence; joy, immersion, restoration and respite; and management of mental health conditions. Gardening with others, including other gardeners, garden leaders, friends and family, amplified the well‐being effects of the ‘gardening triad.’
Identification of the ‘gardening triad’ expands understanding of the salient health‐promoting characteristics of gardening beyond simple exposure to nature, food production and physical activity. It embeds gardeners in relationship with their gardens as active participants eliciting universal emotional processes which, in turn, manifested as improved social and emotional well‐being. Gardening, as an avenue for improving well‐being, should be supported widely.
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The Cambridge Handbook of Environmental Sociology is a go-to resource for cutting-edge research in the field. This two-volume work covers the rich theoretic foundations of the sub-discipline, as well as novel approaches and emerging areas of research that add vitality and momentum to the discipline. Over the course of sixty chapters, the authors featured in this work reach new levels of theoretical depth, incorporating a global scope and diversity of cases. This book explores the broad scope of crucial disciplinary ideas and areas of research, extending its investigation to the trajectories of thought that led to their unfolding. This unique work serves as an invaluable tool for all those working in the nexus of environment and society.
Responding to growing calls for system dynamics (SD) research to engage with structural racism, this article examines the barriers that Black farmers in New York State face and explores values‐based public institutional food procurement (VBFP) as one possible solution for overcoming these barriers. Combining a qualitative data analysis with causal loop diagrams, this analysis reveals that ongoing structural racism generates (1) structural disconnects between Black farmers' and public institutions' supply chains that inhibit their integration; and (2) procurement policies that create new, rather than addressing existing, barriers for Black farmers. VBFP initiatives' potential to support Black farmers is thus dependent upon dismantling structural racism. In addition, this article advances SD supply chain research by examining one effort to align supply chains with social and environmental values and demonstrates how causal loop diagrams, with their emphasis on system structure, reveal why values‐based supply chain efforts in general often struggle. © 2024 System Dynamics Society.
Urban agriculture has gained prominence over the last decade in New Orleans, but the majority of the new gardens and farms that have emerged in the city since 2010 are neither culturally nor socially connected to the vibrant history of local food provisioning in the city’s Black communities. The history is tied closely to the region’s economic boom and bust, systemic oppression and segregation, and the cultural co-optation and devaluation of Black folk foodways in the city. By relying on the oral history to complement where the official or academic documentation has failed to capture the rich history of urban gardening by Black New Orleanians, this article demonstrates that the residents of Black communities in New Orleans once grew their own food, both as a form of collective efficacy and as a way of passing on horticultural knowledge and skills.
The contributors to this book represent a wide breadth of scholarly approaches, including law, social and environmental science, engineering, as well as from the arts and humanities. The chapters explore what environmental violence is and does, and the variety of ways in which it affects different communities. The authors draw on empirical data from around the globe, including Ukraine, French Polynesia, Latin America, and the Arctic. The variety of responses to environmental violence by different communities, whether through active resistance or the creative arts, are also discussed, providing the foundation on which to build alternatives to the potentially damaging trajectory on which humans currently find themselves. This book is indispensable for researchers and policymakers in environmental policy and peacebuilding. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
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