The Food Studies Program, The Tishman Environment and Design Center, and the Food and Social Justice Action Research Lab (FJAR)  at The New School are honored to present this multi-media panel event featuring author, sound practitioner, and DJ Lynnée Denise; artist, curator, mother, and producer Elissa Blount Moorhead; and Assistant Professor of Race and Media in the School of Media Studies at The New School Dr. Brittnay Proctor-Habil. The event is part of the Food Studies Program’s “Food, Foraging, and Social Justice” series and The New School’s Earth Month activities. It is also co-sponsored by the SexTech Lab and the Gender and Sexualities Studies Institute at The New School.

Over two decades ago Dr. Gail P. Myers, the co-founder of Farms to Grow, Inc and director of Rhythms of the Land, interviewed her first 92-year-old elder on life and legacy of a sharecropper. During the summer of 2012, Dr. Myers toured 10 southern states, interviewing over 30 farmers, sharecroppers, and gardeners and a 5th generation coil basket weaver. Several of these interviews are with elders, 98, 92, and 109.  

Rhythms of the Land fills the gap of the missing narrative after emancipation and honors black farmers as stewards of the land, love of family and community despite the overwhelming odds of life as a sharecropper.

Music can be used to understand and communicate about food justice and environmental justice. Communicating through music can strengthen and uplift food and environmental justice practice that is diverse in terms of epistemology, representation, and mode. Music can offer references that may speak to specific and diverse audiences, and opens the door for deeper understandings of inequity and justice in ways that step away from Eurocentric insistence on linear and written communication to teach, exchange knowledge, or debate. This multimedia event brings together four leading and inspiring thinkers, activists, and artists who connect food or environmental justice with music through their work in a panel discussion accompanied by musical samples and audience questions.

Dr. Julian Agyeman, Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning, and Fletcher Professor of Rhetoric and Debate at Tufts University, is one of the leading thinkers in environmental justice and food justice. In this talk, Julian will outline the concept of just sustainabilities as a response to the ‘equity deficit’ of much sustainability thinking and practice. He will explore his contention that who can belong in our cities will ultimately determine what our cities can become. He will illustrate his ideas with examples from urban planning and design, the ‘Minneapolis Paradox’ and food justice.

Commonly used and designed open spaces are anchor points in the city and a possible response to the consequences of urbanization and climate change, as well as to the presence of social and cultural differences. Urban Open Space + Strategies in between Architecture and Open Space Planning, edited by Dr. Carolin Mees, provides a unique interdisciplinary discourse of scientific texts and opinion papers by international experts depicting the diversity of add-ons from a range of micro- and macro-perspectives, and offering strategies for collaborative, multi-coded urban spaces at the intersection of architecture and open space planning.

Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice, (2020, University of Minnesota Press), edited by Hanna Garth and Ashanté M. Reese, analyzes how Blackness is contested through food, differing ideas of what makes our sustenance “healthy,” and Black individuals’ own beliefs about what their cuisine should be. This comprehensive look at Black food culture and the various forms of violence that threaten the future of this cuisine centers Blackness in a field that has too often framed Black issues through a white-centric lens, offering new ways to think about access, privilege, equity, and justice.

Join us on Monday October 26th at 4pm for a presentation and discussion with Dr. Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern, Assistant Professor of Food Studies at Syracuse University. Dr. Minkoff-Zern will discuss her new book The New American Farmer: Immigration, Race, and the Struggle for Sustainability (2019, MIT Press).

Join us on March 11th for a presentation and discussion with Dr. Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern, Assistant Professor of Food Studies at Syracuse University. Dr. Minkoff-Zern will discuss her new book The New American Farmer: Immigration, Race, and the Struggle for Sustainability (2019, MIT Press).