This working group aims to initiate research at the confluence of land, foodways, and sovereignty. We are interested in studying land stewardship as an expression of sovereignty, and asking what the relationship between food, subsistence, and sovereignty is for land workers of multiple subjectivities—queer and trans, Black, Asian, and Indigenous farmers. We engage with sovereignty as it is figured within Native Studies as well as Black Studies, as expressive and iterative strategies for articulating political agency and self-determination amongst the violence of white supremacy and settler imperialisms. This working group will be directly in dialogue with active farms and land projects engaged in food justice and sovereignty initiatives in the Hudson Valley, Southwest Connecticut and North Jersey areas, including Iron Path Farms, Ceiba Valley Farms, Gentle Time Farm, and Star Route Farm. These projects regenerate and reproduce the material conditions for complex and necessarily impure sovereignties, through their constellation of political practices and commitments. We intend to meet at least twice a semester to discuss academic writing related to the questions of land, food, and sovereignty, as well as host small symposia in conversation with the cultural workers and land stewards at the helm of these local agricultural projects. This transdisciplinary work intends to generate connections between ongoing food justice work and the scholars involved herein, and link our academic labor to broader ecologies of reproductive labor, emphasizing our mutual responsibility to and contingency upon one another.
Organizers:
Dr. Carla Cevasco is a scholar interested in food and the body in early America and beyond. She is Associate Professor of American Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Her second book, Young and Hungry, is a history of feeding infants and children in the United States, is under contract in the W. Hodding Carter III imprint at University of North Carolina Press. Her first book, Violent Appetites: Hunger in the Early Northeast, was published by Yale University Press in 2022. Her scholarship has appeared in Early American Studies, New England Quarterly, Art History, and Journal of Early American History. Her public writing has been featured in The Atlantic, TIME, Lapham's Quarterly, Nursing Clio, Common-Place, The Junto, and The Recipes Project.
Dr. Sylvia Chan-Malik is a scholar of American studies, critical race and ethnic studies, women’s and gender studies, and religious studies. She is a core faculty member in the Departments of American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and affiliate graduate faculty for the Department of Religion at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Dr. Chan-Malik teaches courses on Race and Ethnicity in the U.S., Islam in/and America, Race and Religion, Social Justice, Food Justice, and Islam and Gender.
Lu Rose Bitucci is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and a multidisciplinary artist and youth educator. Their scholarly research is focused on the mediation of landscape and embodiment through infrastructure in the U.S. settler colonial regimes occupying Onondaga and broader Haudenosaunee geographies.