Leveraging Community-Engaged Research for Food Justice

Keywords: Food Justice, Urban Agriculture, Food Apartheid, Community-engaged learning
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 31

Abstract

We discuss the transformative power of community-engaged research for food justice by sharing our journey as scholar-activists co-producing knowledge with community partners in a food apartheid-impacted area in Salt Lake City, Utah. Initially, we connected with an urban CSA farm in a USDA-designated food desert to explore their concerns regarding their export of food from marginalized and racialized areas of the city to predominantly white affluent neighborhoods. We discovered that this pattern is common for urban farmers, elucidating the legacy of food apartheid that undermines farmers’ aims of working towards food justice. Utilizing a variety of methods including critical geographic mapping, ethnographic field work, and interviews with farmers and food access advocates, we examine how food-security based approaches to food access can reinscribe the conditions that create food apartheid whereas collaborative research can initiate more critical approaches for structural change. For example, through interviews with urban farmers, we consider innovative possibilities for zoning and economic policy that might support food justice more broadly than simply enhancing access and asserting ‘white foodways as the right foodways’. We also engage with educational access advocates to explore how a reciprocal agriculture education course co-taught by community members and faculty and taking place in community, university, and schoolyard gardens, can foster a sense of place on campus for immigrant and first-generation college students while increasing community resilience and food sovereignty at home. Ultimately, we use our food-based work to describe how community engagement can leverage transformation on several different environmental justice fronts.