Land Justice: Re-imagining Land, Food, and the Commons


Book Description

In recent decades, the various strands of the food movement have made enormous strides in calling attention the many shortcomings and injustices of our food and agricultural system. Farmers, activists, scholars, and everyday citizens have also worked creatively to rebuild local food economies, advocate for food justice, and promote more sustainable, agroecological farming practices. However, the movement for fairer, healthier, and more autonomous food is continually blocked by one obstacle: land access. As long as land remains unaffordable and inaccessible to most people, we cannot truly transform the food system. The term land-grabbing is most commonly used to refer to the large-scale acquisition of agricultural land in Asian, African, or Latin American countries by foreign investors. However, land has and continues to be “grabbed” in North America, as well, through discrimination, real estate speculation, gentrification, financialization, extractive energy production, and tourism. This edited volume, with chapters from a wide range of activists and scholars, explores the history of land theft, dispossession, and consolidation in the United States. It also looks at alternative ways forward toward democratized, land justice, based on redistributive policies and cooperative ownership models. With prefaces from leaders in the food justice and family farming movements, the book opens with a look at the legacies of white-settler colonialism in the southwestern United States. From there, it moves into a collectively-authored section on Black Agrarianism, which details the long history of land dispossession among Black farmers in the southeastern US, as well as the creative acts of resistance they have used to acquire land and collectively farm it. The next section, on gender, explores structural and cultural discrimination against women landowners in the Midwest and also role of “womanism” in land-based struggles. Next, a section on the cross-border implications of land enclosures and consolidations includes a consideration of what land justice could mean for farm workers in the US, followed by an essay on the challenges facing young and aspiring farmers. Finally, the book explores the urban dimensions of land justice and their implications for locally-autonomous food systems, and lessons from previous struggles for democratized land access. Ultimately, the book makes the case that to move forward to a more equitable, just, sustainable, and sovereign agriculture system, the various strands of the food movement must come together for land justice.




Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Diets


Book Description

This handbook presents a must-read, comprehensive and state of the art overview of sustainable diets, an issue critical to the environment and the health and well-being of society. Sustainable diets seek to minimise and mitigate the significant negative impact food production has on the environment. Simultaneously they aim to address worrying health trends in food consumption through the promotion of healthy diets that reduce premature disability, disease and death. Within the Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Diets, creative, compassionate, critical, and collaborative solutions are called for across nations, across disciplines and sectors. In order to address these wide-ranging issues the volume is split into sections dealing with environmental strategies, health and well-being, education and public engagement, social policies and food environments, transformations and food movements, economics and trade, design and measurement mechanisms and food sovereignty. Comprising of contributions from up and coming and established academics, the handbook provides a global, multi-disciplinary assessment of sustainable diets, drawing on case studies from regions across the world. The handbook concludes with a call to action, which provides readers with a comprehensive map of strategies that could dramatically increase sustainability and help to reverse global warming, diet related non-communicable diseases, and oppression and racism. This decisive collection is essential reading for students, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers concerned with promoting sustainable diets and thus establishing a sustainable food system to ensure access to healthy and nutritious food for all.




Commoning the City


Book Description

This collection seeks to expand the limits of current debates about urban commoning practices that imply a radical will to establish collaborative and solidarity networks based on anti-capitalist principles of economics, ecology and ethics. The chapters in this volume draw on case studies in a diversity of urban contexts, ranging from Detroit, USA to Kyrenia, Cyprus – on urban gardening and land stewardship, collaborative housing experiments, alternative food networks, claims to urban leisure space, migrants’ appropriation of urban space and workers’ cooperatives/collectives. The analysis pursued by the eleven chapters opens new fields of research in front of us: the entanglements of racial capitalism with enclosures and of black geographies with the commons, the critical history of settler colonialism and indigenous commons, law as a force of enclosure and as a strategy of commoning, housing commons from the urban scale perspective, solidarity economies as labour commons, territoriality in the urban commons, the non-territoriality of mobile commons, the new materialist and post-humanist critique of the commons debate and feminist ethics of care.




The Rhetoric of Social Movements


Book Description

This collection provides an accessible yet rigorous survey of the rhetorical study of historical and contemporary social movements and promotes the study of relations between strategy, symbolic action, and social assemblage. Offering a comprehensive collection of the latest research in the field, The Rhetoric of Social Movements: Networks, Power, and New Media suggests a framework for the study of social movements grounded in a methodology of "slow inquiry" and the interconnectedness of these imminent phenomena. Chapters address the rhetorical tactics that social movements use to gain attention and challenge power; the centrality of traditional and new media in social movements; the operations of power in movement organization, leadership, and local and global networking; and emerging contents and environments for social movements in the twenty-first century. Each chapter is framed by case studies (drawn from movements across the world, ranging from Black Lives Matter and Occupy to Greek anarchism and indigenous land protests) that ground conceptual characteristics of social movements in their continuously unfolding reality, furnishing readers with both practical and theoretical insights. The Rhetoric of Social Movements will be of interest to scholars and advanced students of rhetoric, communication, media studies, cultural studies, social protest and activism, and political science.




Between Fault Lines and Front Lines


Book Description

Inequality is one of today's greatest challenges, obstructing poverty reduction and sustainable development. As the power of elites grows and societal gaps widen, institutions representing the public good and universal values are increasingly disempowered or co-opted, and visions of social justice and equity side-lined. This book explores the roles of elites and institutions of power in the deepening of social and economic cleavages across the globe, by asking how inequalities have reshaped structures from the local to the transnational level, and what consequences they have wrought. In addition, the contributors present examples of peaceful processes of policy change that have made societies greener and more socially just, levelled out social stratification, and devolved power and resources from elites to non-elites, or towards marginalized or discriminated groups. Based on cutting-edge empirical research, the chapters in this volume bring together conceptual thinking and a number of case studies from the Global North and South, combining different levels of analysis and a range of qualitative research methods to present solutions for closing the inequality gap.




Time and Social Theory


Book Description

Time is at the forefront of contemporary scholarly inquiry across the natural sciences and the humanities. Yet the social sciences have remained substantially isolated from time-related concerns. This book argues that time should be a key part of social theory and focuses concern upon issues which have emerged as central to an understanding of today's social world. Through her analysis of time Barbara Adam shows that our contemporary social theories are firmly embedded in Newtonian science and classical dualistic philosophy. She exposes these classical frameworks of thought as inadequate to the task of conceptualizing our contemporary world of standardized time, computers, nuclear power and global telecommunications.




The Courage to Hope


Book Description

In the summer of 2010, Shirley Sherrod was catapulted into a media storm that blew apart her life and her job doing what she'd done for decades: helping poor, hardworking people live the American dream. She was a lifelong activist who served as Georgia's first black director of rural development. A right-wing blogger, the now late Andrew Breitbart, disseminated a video clip of a speech Sherrod had given to the Georgia NAACP, intending to make her an example of "reverse racism." The right-wing media ramped up the outrage, and before Sherrod had a chance to defend herself, the Obama administration demanded her resignation. Then, after hearing from Sherrod herself and learning the entire truth of what she said in that speech, the administration tried to backtrack. As public officials and media professionals admitted to being duped and apologized for their rush to judgment, Sherrod found herself the subject of a teachable moment. The Courage to Hope addresses this regret-table episode in American politics, but it also tells Sherrod's own story of growing up on a farm in southwest Georgia during the final violent years of Jim Crow. As a child she dreamed of leaving the South, but when her father was murdered by a white neighbor who was never brought to justice, Sherrod made a vow to stay in Georgia and commit herself to the cause of truth and racial healing. With her husband, Charles, a legend in the civil rights movement, she has devoted her life to empowering poor people and rural communities--Americans who are most in need. The incident that brought Sherrod into the spotlight does not define her life and work, but it strengthens her commitment to stand against the politics of fear and have the courage to hope.




The Hybrid Governance of Urban Food Movements


Book Description

Undertaking a journey into the “hybrid governance” of urban food movements, this book offers an original and nuanced analysis of the urban milieu as epicentre of food activism and food governance. Through examples of food movements in the city-regions of Toronto and Brussels, the author highlights the critical governance tensions urban food initiatives experience as they develop in diverse ways and seek to change food systems and their related socio-political conditions. The author investigates urban food movements as they negotiate access to land in urban areas, build resilient food network organisations, and develop supportive policies and empowering institutions for urban food governance. Through the analysis of these tensions, the book effectively puts real-life challenges of urban food movements in the spotlight—challenges that are increasingly visible and pertinent in today’s converging climate, socio-political, and health crises. The author offers suggestions to improve alternative food practices and, ultimately, to design promising pathways to instigate food system change.




Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States


Book Description

“All those interested in Indigenous food systems, sovereignty issues, or environment, and their path toward recovery should read this powerful book.” —Kathie L. Beebe, American Indian Quarterly Centuries of colonization and other factors have disrupted indigenous communities’ ability to control their own food systems. This volume explores the meaning and importance of food sovereignty for Native peoples in the United States, and asks whether and how it might be achieved and sustained. Unprecedented in its focus and scope, this collection addresses nearly every aspect of indigenous food sovereignty, from revitalizing ancestral gardens and traditional ways of hunting, gathering, and seed saving to the difficult realities of racism, treaty abrogation, tribal sociopolitical factionalism, and the entrenched beliefs that processed foods are superior to traditional tribal fare. The contributors include scholar-activists in the fields of ethnobotany, history, anthropology, nutrition, insect ecology, biology, marine environmentalism, and federal Indian law, as well as indigenous seed savers and keepers, cooks, farmers, spearfishers, and community activists. After identifying the challenges involved in revitalizing and maintaining traditional food systems, these writers offer advice and encouragement to those concerned about tribal health, environmental destruction, loss of species habitat, and governmental food control.




Re:imagining Change


Book Description

Re:Imagining Change provides resources, theory, hands-on tools, and illuminating case studies for the next generation of innovative change-makers. This unique book explores how culture, media, memes, and narrative intertwine with social change strategies, and offers practical methods to amplify progressive causes in the popular culture. Re:Imagining Change is an inspirational inside look at the trailblazing methodology developed by the Center for Story-based Strategy over fifteen years of their movement building partnerships. This practitioner’s guide is an impassioned call to innovate our strategies for confronting the escalating social and ecological crises of the twenty-first century. This new, expanded second edition includes updated examples from the frontlines of social movements and provides the reader with easy-to-use tools to change the stories they care about most.