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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 against food justice, especially the goal of dismantling structural inequalities and advancing social equity. This commentary chronicles the ongoing and incomplete process by which I have carried out food justice research and worked toward food justice. In short, reciprocal research requires working with, not for, organizations and communities. This entails ongoing acts of solidarity. One way to express this is through flexibility with research goals in order to tailor all or parts of one's project to answer questions that increase understanding of how to challenge structural inequalities and advance social equity. Relatedly, openness to how food justice activists and organizations confront the food movement and society more broadly to address whiteness, privilege, racial inequality, and notions of diversity can enrich critical social science. Of equal importance is sweat equity. Most food justice activists and organizations have few resources and cannot serve the whims of researchers. Therefore, providing labor is an important allied act. This increases the researchers' empathy with activists, organizations, and communities, and creates opportunities to build trust and dissolve social boundaries. To enter into a situation that deepens our knowledge of the food justice movement and advances food justice requires solidarity and sweat equity.
Cognition and Instruction, 2016
2018
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 calls on the food-focused to broaden and deepen their commitment to the struggle against structural inequalities both within and beyond the food system. In an engrossing, historically grounded, and ethnographically rich narrative, Joshua Sbicca argues that food justice is more than just a myopic focus on food, allowing scholars and activists alike to investigate the causes behind inequities and evaluate and implement political strategies to overcome them. Focusing on carceral, labor, and immigration crises, Sbicca tells the stories of three California-based food movement organizations, showing that when activists use food to confront neoliberal capitalism and institutional racism, they can creatively expand how to practice and achieve food justice. Sbicca sets his central argument in opposition to apolitical and individual solutions, discussing national food movement campaigns and the need for economically and racially just food policies—a matter of vital public concern with deep implications for building collective power across a diversity of interests.
Sociological Inquiry, 2009
Environmental Research Letters, 2018
Despite popular momentum behind North American civil society initiatives to advance social justice and ecological resilience in the food system, food movements have had limited success engaging with migrant farmworkers. This article describes a partnership between a nonprofit food network organization in Ontario, Canada, with a mandate to advance healthy food and farming across the region and university researchers. The purpose of this community-based research was to gather a broad range of actionable ideas from key informants to advance health and equity conditions of migrant farmworkers. "Key solution ideas" were gathered primarily through 11 in-depth interviews and ongoing feedback from relevant actors. We reflect on the unique features of approaching this often-divisive area of inquiry through a university-community partnership. Reviewing the solution ideas, we categorize proposals for advancing farmworker health and equity under four broad themes: (a) health and safety, (b) farmworker recruitment and mobility, (c) community building and social integration, and (d) immigration policy. We then critically evaluate the constraints and opportunities for addressing proposals through a network-based food organization that takes a "big tent" approach to collaborative action on polarizing issues. A tension for such organizations is taking meaningful action while avoiding overly polarizing political stances, which can alienate some members and neglect obligations to funders. Notwithstanding such tensions, community-university research partnerships have the potential to expand spaces for advancing equity with farmworkers. As food networks are seeking to build meaningful alliances with migrant justice and labour movements, this study provides a timely contribution to literature and practice at the intersection of community-based participatory research, sustainable food networks, labour, and immigration.
ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2018
A broad diversity of people and groups engage in food justice work throughout the world, aiming to dismantle uneven power dynamics in the food system from community- to global scales. Many such individual actors, often referred to as activists, represent communities that bear the brunt of food system injustices. Meanwhile, many academics, often referred to as scholars, have been eager to support community-based food justice efforts. Although much existing academic writing suggests that one can only be either a community activist or a scholar, the lines between food justice scholarship and activism are often blurry. Working beyond dichotomies can help to strengthen these initiatives; publishing analyses about how academics put food justice theories into practice is a part of such an effort. In this themed section, we juxtapose the terms “activist-scholar” and “scholar-activist” to underscore the intersecting and different positionalities of people engaged in food justice work. The papers in this section are outcomes of two sessions on food justice scholar-activism and activist scholarship that we organized at the 2016 American Association of Geographers conference in San Francisco, California. Each of the papers productively questions the scholar-activist ‘dichotomy’ and provides a unique example of work that bridges this divide. In curating this collection of papers, we have sought to enrich a growing dialogue within the critical geography and critical food systems literature about how academics and activists can contribute to community-based food justice initiatives—through, and in addition to, our scholarly work. Open access: https://www.acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1735.
Interest in food movements has been growing dramatically, but until recently there has been limited engagement with the challenges facing workers across the food system. Of the studies that do exist, there is little focus on the processes and relationships that lead to solutions. This article explores ways that community-engaged teaching and research partnerships can help to build meaningful justice with food workers. The text builds on a special roundtable session held at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers in Chicago in April 2015, which involved a range of academic scholars and community-based activists. We present these key perspectives on collaborative research and teaching and learning as food-labor scholar-activists. We argue that despite significant gaps in the way that food movements are addressing labor issues, community-campus collaborations present an opportunity for building alliances to foster food justice. Building on our collective analysis and reflection, we point to five recommendations for fostering collaboration: connecting to personal experience; building trust; developing common strategies; building on previous community efforts; and, appreciating power differences and reciprocating accordingly. We conclude with some final thoughts on future research directions.
This commentary argues for a need to go “beyond food” in research, writing, and activism on the food system. Noting a tendency within both academic and activist discourse around food to focus on “the food itself,” rather than on broader structures of inequality and disinvestment, I argue that more research is needed that focuses explicitly on the ways in which institutional structures and systems (including nonprofits, schools, housing, as well as the food system) can exacerbate broad injustices, including limited food access. I draw on research experience in post–Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, USA, as well as commentary from eminent food systems scholars, to advocate for new research trajectories that utilize food as a lens for contesting broader structures of injustice, rather than advocating for more and better food as an end in itself.
Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, 2019
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 build the activist base needed to transform the agrifood system.
DergiPark (Istanbul University), 2016
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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ACADEMIC RESEARCH IN BUSINESS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES, 2024
Язычество в современной России: опыт междисциплинарного исследования: монография / под ред. Р. В. Шиженского. — Калининград : Издательство БФУ им. И. Кан- та, 2023. — 233 с., 2023
Emerging Science Journal, 2023
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Journal of Clinical Monitoring and Computing
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