CHANGE IS GROWING: CLIMATE CHANGE AND FOOD JUSTICE AMONG SMALL-SCALE PRODUCERS IN THE METROPOLITAN NEW ORLEANS AREA

Keywords: urban agriculture, food justice, climate change, feminist geography
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 30

Abstract

Consideration of gender and, especially, climate change as socio-spatial concepts and analytic frames have skyrocketed over the last 40 and 20 years respectively. Yet, they are rarely meaningfully engaged within extant food justice scholarship. This is surprising for two main reasons: 1) these gaps are well-acknowledged within the field (Gilson and Kenehan 2019; Glennie and Alkon 2018; Sachs and Patel-Campillo 2014) and 2) the well-known unevenness and severity of climate impacts to global humanity (see IPCC 2021). Based on years of participant observation and upcoming qualitative interviews, my dissertation project addresses these gaps and builds on preliminary theoretical foundations by centering climate and gender in a case study of market-oriented urban and peri-urban agricultural production in the New Orleans metropolitan area, an area culturally and ecologically situated as the preeminent frontline coastal community in the U.S. today. I engage critical and feminist geographic frameworks (see Parker's 2016 Feminist Partial Political Economy of Place framework) to complete this work. My contribution stems from how I understand climate change as not only a “condition” of the world (Bulkeley 2019), but as an assemblage of acute and continuous biophysical phenomena and socially-mediated dynamics already impacting small-scale agricultural producers globally, a relationship which I argue is understudied in the context of industrialized nations in particular. As a result, I am able to articulate the ways in which climate change variably impacts urban agricultural production and, by proxy, producers, through social and biophysical mechanisms and processes, with meaningful consequences to urban development.