Decolonizing Food Justice: Naming, Resisting, and Researching Colonizing Forces in the Movement

Abstract

Over the past 15 years social movements for community food security, food sovereignty, and food justice have organized to address the failures of the multinational, industrial food system to fairly and equitably distribute healthy, affordable, culturally appropriate real food. At the same time, these social movements, and research about them, re-inscribe white, patriarchal systems of power and privilege. We argue that in order to correct this pattern we must relocate our social movement goals and practices within a decolonizing and feminist leadership framework. This framework challenges movement leadership and scholarship by white people who uncritically assume a natural order of leadership based on academic achievement. We analyze critical points in our collaboration over the last four years using these frameworks. Doing so highlights the challenges and possibilities for a more inclusive food justice movement and more just scholarship.

Graduate Students Bringing Emotional Rigor to the Heart of Community-University Relations in Food Dignity

“…While there are some examples of scholars integrating emotional rigor in their work, including in the fringes of Food Dignity (Bradley & Herrera, 2016;Wechsler, 2017), there are ways we wish we had done this better. For example, Katie regrets not documenting her emotional experiences more thoroughly.…”

Cultivating Equitable Ground: Community-based Participatory Research To Connect Food Movements with Migrant Farmworkers

“…Disproportionate whiteness and class privilege within many sustainable food initiatives tend to encourage activities based on consumption that unduly benefit relatively privileged "consumer-citizens," thereby reifying social inequalities (Bradley & Herrera, 2015;Gibb & Wittman, 2013;Ramírez, 2014;Turje, 2012). In sustainable food initiatives, consumer-citizens based in urban areas far outnumber rural food producers, and the social and geographic distance generates a lack of understanding about farmworkers' day-to-day realities.…”

Food sovereignty education across the Americas: multiple origins, converging movements

“…First, the political ecology of education (PEoE) draws attention to how the distribution of power and resources among interconnected political and cultural entities mediates pedagogical processes-from tacit to formal learning-and related knowledge systems at various interconnected scales (Meek 2015a, b, c;Bradley and Herrera 2016). When applied to agriculture, the PEoE lens helps illuminate how movements gain access to the political and economic resources necessary to educate for food sovereignty.…”