New Critical Race and Food Studies Community

If you haven’t already, I invite you to join the new online Critical Race and Food Studies community here: http://criticalracefood.ning.com or http://criticalracefood.ning.com/?xgi=1cmegP0uoS6Y05

I created this listserv to help those of us find the support we need in a burgeoning field of CRITICAL food studies that takes seriously a critical race analysis of food. In terms of ‘race’ inquiries, this can be incorporating how racialization, racism, anti-racism, normative whiteness, racialized colonialism and neocolonialism, racialized globalism, racial identity building, etc., affect one’s relationship to and with food/farming (or any other ‘food’ related topic).

I know race does not exist in a vaccuum. Class, gender, sexaulity, language, religion, sexual orientation, economics, etc affect “race and food” as well.Please bring these issues to the table.

I am hoping that this will be an active and critical community. I would love to see people being mentored by people who have been in the field much longer. I get quite a few undergrads writing me, “I want to incorporate food and race into my studies but I don’t know where to start and my advisors know race but nothing about food… or nothing about race but know food.”

I am also hoping that this site will help us help each other with paper workshopping, mentoring, idea brainstorming, etc. Writing a book or just published a paper related to food and or race? Let us know! Do you have an event you want to put on? Let us know! Know if funding or jobs of interest for this communty? Let us know.

My other goal for this group is to eventually put together a peer reviewed journal that focused on Critical Race and Food Studies intersections. If you are interested in making this happen, please let me know. If you have experience with putting together a journal from scratch, I’d love to have you on board as an advisor.

Food is big in the USA, but I simply feel that mainstream critiques of food really lack that critical component that questions race, class, gender, national, able bodied, etc., privilege and power around food.

You make this community happen. You can add forum discussion, add events, add blog posting, start your own sub research groups on any topic. All I ask is that participants be mindful and compassionate in how they dialogue here. This should be a ‘safe’ space for us to talk about topics that we are often asked to be ‘silent’ about in our departments or organizations. Such topics are, but no limited to: ‘fatphobia’ within vegan rhetoric, ableism and healthy foods rhetoric, animal rights and food, speciesism, dominance of white middle class 1st world able bodied perspective within alternative foods movement, how fair and ethical is ‘fair trade’? , the dismissal of non-academic epistemologies as ‘non-scholarly’, etc. Though thsee are not directly connected to ‘race’, a critical race perspective can be applied to these ‘tabboo’ topics.

Best, Breeze Harper PhD Candidate Critical Food and Critical Race Geographies UC Davis breezeharper (at) gmail (dot) com www.breezeharper.com