ONLINE: The Future of Food Justice

press release: The "Future of Food Justice" webinar is the last segment of the 18-month Sawyer Seminar, "Interrogating the Plantationocene." The closing virtual event of the seminar series aims to spark dialogue between national and international activists, scholars, and the broader public. The Sawyer Seminar envisions it as an opportunity to expand and deepen a growing conversation around the relationship between food justice and social justice, with a particular focus on the past and present effects of racism and colonialism on global food systems. Register here. Featuring food and environmental justice activists Malik Yakini and Ashlesha Khadse, with commentary by Monica White, Nan Enstad, and Sophie Sapp Moore.   

Sawyer Seminar: Interrogating the Plantationocene

Examining the past and present of plantations, their materialities, the economic, ecological, and political transformations they wrought, and their significance to the making of human bodies, capitalism, and land over the course of four centuries.

This seminar, running from January 2019 through May 2020, will draw together anthropologists, artists, economists, environmental scientists, geographers, historians, lawyers, literary scholars, and sociologists, among others, to explore and deepen the concept of the Plantationocene. We will also consider other ways of naming our epoch (cene) that have recently been proposed, including Capitalocene (conceiving the Anthropocene as a result of ecological regimes inherent to capitalism, with its attendant demands for cheap labor, energy, food, and resources) and Chthulucene (a term that suggests the multispecies becomings that make up the storied histories of human and nonhuman lives). In doing so, we aim to come to terms with the plantation as a transformational moment in human and natural history on a global scale that is at the same time attentive to structures of power embedded in imperial and capitalist formations, the erasure of certain forms of life and relationships in such formations, and the enduring layers of history and legacies of plantation capitalism that persist, manifested in acts of racialized violence, growing land alienation, and accelerated species loss. At the same time, we aim to make visible past and present refugia of resistance, where different ways of being, sustained by different economies and forms of knowledge, have flourished.