Reworlding the “Real World”

Community-led Interventions in Food and Human Settlement Innovation - A brief overview of the research project and its purpose

Food sovereignty and food justice are politically charged and contextually dependent terms most often traceable to movement-making and the development of self-determined systems of provenance designed by and for minoritized community members. These terms identify and respond to the compounded wicked problem of inequitable and unsustainable food and human settlement systems that are insufficient to meet the structurally, and socially disproportionate effects of climate, health, geopolitical, and economic crisis. This trans-sectoral problem intersects directly with movements and aspirations for more equitable and nutritious food production and consumption, sustainable land and water access, public health and wellness, localized economic development, and affordable and secure housing. (Agyeman, 2022, Grey and Patel, 2015; Redmond and White, 2018). However, the terms food sovereignty and food justice as applied across the two settler colonial states of the U.S. and Australia carry important semantic and contextual differences. These differences, and their politics, play out at urban scale in Minneapolis and Sydney through efforts of community based organizations seeking to address social, environment, and other core, existential issues with implications for future-making, and reworlding endeavors. This includes, as Bourgault and Winters’ (2023) suggest, “opening a space for new conditions of living and relating, inviting alternative ways of being, teaching and learning”. Mignolo and Walsh (2018) describe this space in counter-hegemonic terms contrasting against a “colonial matrix of power” (coined by Quijano (2000)) that “constitutes ‘a complex [and ever-contested] structure of management and controls composed of domains, levels, and flows’ that sustains a coloniser’s model of the world”. A world whereby each aspect of human life is “subjected to the colonial matrix of power in its hierarchies and hetararchies” (Sabelo, 2023; Quijano, 2000, Mignolo and Walsh, 2018). As outlined below, this project’s intended contribution to the project of reworlding is juxtaposed against what Mbembe and Sarr (2023) describe (also cited in Sabelo’s (2023) recent work) as “‘two forms of disenchanted thinking’, namely ‘apocalyptic thinking’ and ‘technological messianism’ (technolatry)” (Sabelo, 2023; Mbembe and Sarr, 2023). The colonial matrix of power provides a critical backdrop to this project’s genealogy and my positionality in its ethnographic field sites as an activist researcher working with others on sustainable development projects in two communities in two English settler colonial societies.

Since the 1960’s the popular meaning of community, to which a membered person belongs, has encompasses both relational and territorial domains, with a modern tendency towards a meaning of community that involves common skills, interests and human relations (Gusfield, 1975; Durheim, 1964; McMillan and Chavis, 1986). Shaffer et. al. (2006) propose a third acceptable meaning of community defined as “a logical decision-making unit that may or may not incorporate space”. This incorporated definition accommodates both relational and spatial meanings of community, and emphasizes community capacity to make and implement decisions (2006). I adopt this latter definition of community for this project and couple it with an adaptation of Mathie and Cunningham’s (2003) assertion that community development can be characterized as a community driving the development process itself by identifying and mobilizing existing (but often unrecognized) assets”, and thereby bolstering grassroots efforts to define and realize community health and prosperity.

In the U.S., the prominent definitions and operations of food sovereignty are being deployed by many Indigenous communities and nations, such as the White Earth Band of Minnesota Chippewa, as inextricable from claims of political sovereignty. In this context, food security connotes foods cultivated securely using traditional ecological knowledge and consumed using culturally relevant culinary and medicinal knowledge (White Earth Band of Minnesota Chippewa Tribe Food Sovereignty Initiative Strategic Plan, 2020-2025). In this way, the concept of food sovereignty across societies is context dependent, though the term is seldom if ever applied in ways that accommodate multinational supply chains linking, while separating, food growers and food eaters. Nor is the term commonly applied without an acknowledgement of the intractability of land access from the concept of food sovereignty, or without an explicit contrast against facets of neo-colonial land, and economy, planning and development practices. South of White Earth Nation, in Minnesota’s largest city of Minneapolis, numerous community-based organizations that operate in lower income, racially diverse neighborhoods, deploy the term food justice to describe their urban agriculture and community organizing efforts. These efforts are intended to build solidarity economies anchored in resilient, socially equitable and environmentally sustainable food systems. Examples include East Phillips Neighborhood Institute (EPNI), Central Area Neighborhood Development Organization (CANDO), and Project Sweetie Pie (PSP), which is an organizational partner and will be discussed later in this document. White Earth Nation, EPNI, Project Sweetie Pie, CANDO, and others position their respective approaches to food sovereignty and food security in culturally responsive, holistic terms. And their aspirations, designs and activities seek autonomy from - market domination and extractive, industry-centric systems of food production and consumption. This project will apply the term food sovereignty in a politically generalized way to reflect autonomy from those societal, government and commercial systems and practices that disempower local communities - in particular racially minoritized, deprioritized, and lower income communities. 

In Australia, people are defining and organizing their own conceptions of food sovereignty and food justice as alternatives to a food system dominated by large agribusinesses and export oriented economic planning. For example, the First Nations Bush Food and Botanicals Alliance Australia (FNBBAA) is a First Nations-led industry body “dedicated to protecting the integrity and authenticity of sovereign foods & botanicals igniting first nations culture as an asset” (FNBBAA website, 2023). This symposium was organized in 2019 in response to a media article referencing survey findings commissioned by an Australian bushfoods business alliance purporting that 99% of the income from Australian Native Foods was flowing to non-Aboriginal people, leaving just 1% of the estimated commercial benefit to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander businesses, families and communities (Becker, 2019). More recent research has shown the potential flow of multitudinal benefits to Aboriginal peoples stemming from the integration of Australian native foods into sustainable food systems across dimensions of; society (cultural, nutritional and health), the natural environment (stress tolerance and ecosystem benefits), and the economy (market access and income for remote communities) (Lopes et. al., 2023). Also situated in Australia, the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA) is a non-Indigenous farmer-led civil society organization that does advocacy, research, networking and education work in promotion of “socially-just and ecologically-sound food and agriculture systems” (AFSA Website, 2023). AFSA’s stated focus includes fostering the “democratic participation of Indigenous Peoples, smallholders, and local communities in decision making processes.” (AFSA Website, 2023). Mt Druitt Ethnic Communities Agency (MECA), is a refugee settlement service in Western Sydney that is also a key organizational partner of this project. MECA, like other charitable organizations in the community, operates an emergency food relief service, as well as an award-winning community garden where new arrivals can learn how to grow food and herbs with the support of a TAFE instructor. Like CANDO and PSP in the U.S.A., MECA is interested in supporting the self-determined food security aims of community members - including how to integrate their food shelf and garden programs, which is an area in which I am supporting them.

In both the U.S., and Australia, there exists these two parallel conceptions of self-determined, localized food system change. One is defined and led by Indigenous peoples who view food as a vital element of a broader struggle for cultural integrity, sovereignty, and self-determination, while the other is led by other mutually interested people working to liberate themselves from extractive, toxifying and dis-empowering food systems. Both conceptions have been expressed as an assertion of people’s right to collectively self-determine local, equitable and sustainable food economies for themselves, and they are both closely linked to issues of land access, affordable housing and economic development. The Milan Urban Food Policy Pact, which I will discuss further below, provides a globally adaptable policy framework for action that has been adopted by 270 signatory cities around the world representing 450 million inhabitants (Milan Urban Food Policy Pact website, 2023). Though this pact does not explicitly reference food sovereignty as an objective, its commitments and Framework for Action align with the broader aim of self determined, ecologically sustainable food systems at the human settlement level. In this way, the policy pact - to which both the City of Minneapolis and the City of Sydney are signatories - creates space for community-led and community-centered food systems to emerge, supported by local government policy, influence and capital. Scaling “up” from the local and municipal government scale, the case can be made for the term “national security” to encompass food sovereignty (Xavier, Boylan, 2020). This might be approached through the prioritization, coordination and strengthening of local, bioregional, and national food systems that are more autonomous, affordable, and resistant to external disruptions.

In deed, this would likely require a social technology that supplants the colonial and primary planning technology that Jackson, Johnson & Porter (2017) define as: “the spatial regulation of people and place, … a primary technology in the dispossession of, discrimination against and marginalisation of Indigenous peoples”. As Jackson et. al. further reflect, “Indigenous peoples have struggled against and within Western modes of governing space and place, at the same time as forging alternative pathways and possibilities” (2017). They reference Wolfe’s (1999) distinction between two forms of colonialism; (1) dependence or franchise forms of colonialism predicated on extractive and dominated international labor relations; and (2) form of colonialism predicated on the expropriation of land and racialized replacement of Indigenous people groups with settler groups. The people and relations this project is most interested in carry identities and networks of belonging that include and intersect these two conceptions of colonialized subjectivity, including those who, by way of colonial form (1) above, have themselves been made into migrants and minoritized settlers in the context of colonial form (2) above. 

This research project acknowledges the need for a strong collective sense of solidarity to enable equitable, socially durable and ecologically sustainable forms of development to emerge in places like Western Sydney and Minneapolis, where anti-Black and anti-Indigenous forms of systemic racism and colonial planning technology persist. My research interest therefore includes gaining a better understanding of the antecedents of economic cooperation and solidarity among these minoritized community members and between groups striving for policies and investment in food and human settlement innovation systems. I anticipate that research into these antecedents will lead me to a fundamentally different reading of the economy. J.K. Gibson-Graham evinces persuasively that the purpose of reading for economic difference from more dominant, capitalocentric economic readings is “to proliferate what we have to work with in terms of economic identities, and to challenge ingrained alignments of power that shut down the potential for multiple trajectories of possibility to take flight” (2020). Taking a lateral view of this same/different binary, my research attempts to read for existing and potential economic similitude among Indigenous-led and non-Indigenous-led food sovereignty efforts in Western Sydney and Minnesota that offer the possibility of an economically and environmentally different worlding; one that foregrounds the informed, collective vision and aspirations of under-invested, minoritized community members thinking about sustainability - in their own terms. Worlding that is different from that which is imagined and manufactured by devout neo-liberal food innovators, government planners and commercial developers defining, exhibiting and prosecuting their collective visions of food system innovation and urban transformation. 

From a policy perspective, the aforementioned Milan Urban Food Policy Pact is an example of an international agreement among cities committed "to develop sustainable food systems that are inclusive, resilient, safe and diverse, that provide healthy and affordable food to all people in a human rights-based framework, that minimize waste and conserve biodiversity while adapting to and mitigating impacts of climate change” (Milan Urban Food Policy Pact website, 2023). The “real world” implementation and effectiveness of this food policy pact is dependent on grassroots community organizing, advocacy and lobbying efforts by minoritized, low and middle income community members agitating for more empowerment in food and housing planning and investment decision-making.

This PhD project is an attempt to extend my ongoing involvement in community-based research, organizing, networking, business, and artistic projects in Western Sydney and Minnesota, where I was born, that relate to the design and development of socially equitable, environmentally regenerative projects and change initiatives. In these efforts, I have cultivated two relationships in particular around social empowerment and community development by, and for, people of the African diaspora. Together, these relationships have enabled the industry partnership scholarship that is partially funding this project. The relationship in Western Sydney is with leaders of a charitable refugee settlement service, community garden and food shelf named Mt. Druitt Ethnic Communities Agency (MECA); and the other is with my mentor and Black owned social impact advisory service in Minnesota named Lyceum Partners + Design Incorporated (LPDI). With both MECA’s and LPDI’s industry partnership contribution and resource base, and other personal and organizational relationships in the two locales, I am positioned and encouraged to recruit research participants, engage in community organizing activities, and test design research concepts and prototypes with their internal and external stakeholders. Across the field sites in Minneapolis and Western Sydney, this includes: (a) developing and curating artifacts that demonstrate and communicate mission-led social technology innovations at intersections of ecologically regenerative, and socially equitable, and durable land, food, water, housing and/or energy access; and (b) understanding and creatively communicating visions, barriers, and enablers of government and private sector policies, and investment that address equitable land access challenges, and are consistent with frameworks such as the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact, and the types of projects it might enable. 

I have administratively structured this project as a PhD to (a) access supervisory expertise in cooperative economic research and development, (b) access the funding required to make this project financially viable for me to commit to on a full time basis, and (c) allow for a methodology that is open to adaptation of the topic, theoretical framing, method, and data during the research process (van Assche et al, 2023). This thesis will use a mix of methods, as discussed in that section, to gain an empiric understanding of the relevant challenges, opportunities to enable food sovereignty in these two places and contexts, that can contribute to theory about the successful assemblage of more just, equitable and innovative forms of food system development. This research recognizes that each field setting has its own genealogy of Indigenous - settler conflict, forced removal, forced labor, social engineering and colonial administrative experimentation in service of global mercantile expansion. My intent with this research is to generate actionable, accessible knowledge useful to these and other minoritized people working to resist and replace food systems that render them mere consumers of diabetes and hypertension-inducing industrial food outputs.