In this book, Ashante M. Reese makes clear the structural forces that determine food access in urban areas, highlighting Black residents' navigation of and resistance to unequal food distribution ...systems. Linking these local food issues to the national problem of systemic racism, Reese examines the history of the majority-Black Deanwood neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Reese not only documents racism and residential segregation in the nation's capital but also tracks the ways transnational food corporations have shaped food availability. By connecting community members' stories to the larger issues of racism and gentrification, Reese shows there are hundreds of Deanwoods across the country. Reese's geographies of self-reliance offer an alternative to models that depict Black residents as lacking agency, demonstrating how an ethnographically grounded study can locate and amplify nuances in how Black life unfolds within the context of unequal food access.
Drawing from 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Washington, DC, this article outlines geographies of self‐reliance; a theoretical framework for understanding black food geographies that are ...embedded in histories of self‐reliance as a response to structural inequalities. Using a community garden as a case study, I argue that the garden functions as a site for addressing several manifestations of structural violence: racist and classist depictions of low‐income and working class people, joblessness, gentrification, and youth underdevelopment. Drawing on self‐reliance ideologies as well as collective and personal histories, the residents exhibit a form of agency that demonstrates unwavering hope in the sustainability of their shared community. Through this analysis, I show that self‐reliance functions as a mechanism through which residents navigate spatial inequalities.
Part of my visit was to share my research with a journalist who was writing a story about food, self-reliance, and community. Mr. Jones's store and the community garden were two experiments in how ...freedom gets lived out, within and through mundane everyday practices like maintaining a Black-owned store across two generations and saving and planting seeds on stolen land that would soon be "revitalized." Falling from the World: Earthseed, Black Geographies, and the Apocalyptic Now To explore connections between spatial loss, memory, and using our ethnographic research to build new worlds, I returned to Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, a 1993 science fiction novel set in the aftermath of devasting climate change and vast inequities in the US that have produced an unsustainable amount of violence. In this postapocalyptic world, Olamina leads Earthseed, a religion-turned-community destined to sustain human life.3 We know about Lauren Olamina's movements, thoughts, experiences, and vision for building Earthseed because she documents them.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Joining in virtual conversation, Ashanté M. Reese and Sheyda M. Aboii explore their engagements with Black feminist praxis and theory in their ethnographic fieldwork and emergent projects. Marking ...the start of the inaugural Black Feminist Health Science Studies (BFHSS) Collaboratory in May 2021, this edited interview between a professor and graduate student addresses perspectives on what it might mean to work alongside others and attend to methods of Black life and Black livingness. Together, Reese and Aboii consider refusal as a careful balance between documentation and redaction in their work. They also discuss fieldwork with the dead through altar making, practiced memorialization, and strategic remembrance. Their exchange concludes with a return to Black feminist guides for storytelling, witnessing, and living. Among other thematics, this exchange highlights the creative potential of generous collaboration in BFHSS and the attendant vulnerabilities that create the "something that feels shared" vital to medical anthropological inquiry.
Objective: African Americans experience high rates of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2D). Self-management strategies, such as medication adherence, are key to mitigating negative T2D outcomes. This ...article addresses a gap in the literature by examining the intersections of drug abuse histories and medication adherence among urban, older African Americans with T2D. Method: In-depth interview data were collected as part of a larger ethnographic study examining the subjective experience of T2D among urban older adults. Two representative focal cases were selected and thematic analysis performed to illustrate how former illicit drug addicts perceive prescription medication usage. Results: Narratives reveal that participants are displeased about having to take prescription drugs and are making lifestyle changes to reduce medication usage and maintain sobriety. Discussion: Previous drug abuse not only complicates medication adherence but is also a significant part of how older African Americans who are former drug users frame their understanding of T2D more broadly.
We All We Got Reese, Ashanté M.; Johnson, Symone A.
Environment and society,
09/2022, Letnik:
13, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Urban ecologies are fraught with inequities, often resulting in humanitarian or charity solutions that emphasize lack rather than communities’ self-determination. While these inequities have been ...widely documented, the COVID-19 pandemic further reveals how these crises are not the sum result of individual failures. Rather, they are systemically produced through policies that harm people. How do Black urban residents contend with the sociohistorical antagonisms between feelings of scarcity (e.g., food and housing insecurity, underemployment, and financial strain) and aspirations for abundance? Using ethnographic encounters in Chicago and Austin we consider how practices of mutual aid are meaningful both spatially and affectively. First, we explore how mutual aid transforms “decaying” urban spaces to meet residents’ needs. Second, we explore felt experiences of
mutuality
in social relationships as distinct from authoritarian,
charity
-based relationality. Thinking these spatial and affective dimensions collectively, we work toward a framework of Black ecologies of care and mutual aid.
Carceral spaces-such as neighborhood zones of police surveillance and plantation prisons that exploit incarcerated labor-reflect and reproduce systems of oppression that are also present in the food ...system. The state regularly polices poverty instead of addressing how racial capitalism perpetuates the lack of access to basic needs like healthy food. Conversely, the food system relies on carceral practices to secure disciplined labor by weaponizing the possibility of deportation and wielding the threat of violence to maintain control over racialized undocumented workers. But there are also seeds of struggle for the abolition of penal logics and institutions by incarcerated people and their allies on the outside. These include efforts to transform eating and food work in prison, reimagine food justice as an anti-carceral social movement, and use resistance tactics like hunger strikes. In this special issue introduction, we address these connections and set the stage for all the articles by asking: What does carcerality offer to theorizing and understanding the food system, food cultures, and food relations? And, what does a critical look at food offer toward understanding-and eventually abolishing-carceral systems? We offer theoretical touch points that connect food justice work to long-standing prison abolition organizing while introducing the major themes and contributions of each article included in the issue. We end with a reflection on our aspirations for the future of food studies.
Geospatial analyses of food environments-neighborhood food sources such as supermarkets, corner stores, restaurants, or food pantries-and their impacts on dietary health have become commonplace over ...the past 25 years. Early research varied in approach. One key article in 2002 advocated a range of methods ranging from focus groups to policy analysis.1 Yet, as spatial data and geographic information systems (GIS) software became widely available to researchers and practitioners across the social sciences, public health, and medicine, mapping and geospatial analysis have been the predominant methods. One review published in 2012 found that 53% of published research on the food environment used geospatial analysis, "by far the most common way to measure the food environment."2(p1175) Another review from 2017 found that 49.6% of articles in this area included geospatial analysis before 2007.3 From 2007 through 2015, that percentage increased to 65.3%.3The use of mapping to analyze the food environment has clear benefits. Maps are often intuitively understood by both policymakers and the general public. They suggest a clear path for intervention, highlighting the neighborhoods most often excluded from capital investment. Maps are also affectively powerful, offering striking visuals of disparities in ways that motivate political action. The authors of this article have all taken part in research that uses geospatial analysis to identify areas with low access to healthy foods, and we see value in this approach. Spatial proximity is a key determinant of food access, and maps provide a useful tool for research in this area.
Centering mambo sauce as both a cultural staple and a metaphor for struggles over ownership in Washington, D.C., this article explores mambo sauce’s role in constructing a D.C. identity. Drawing on ...data from ethnographic interviews and newspaper headlines, I argue that, against the background of intense and consistent gentrification that has left the city’s population younger, whiter, and wealthier, mambo sauce becomes a lens through which to examine larger tensions related to race, class, and power. Specifically, I examine mambo sauce as a form of Black cultural production to explore the dialectical relationship between how mambo travels well beyond the carryout restaurants in Black working-class neighborhoods and the displacement of Black residents in the gentrifying city.
Abstract
Objectives:
Rowe and Kahn’s concept of successful aging remains an important model of well-being; additional research is needed, however, to identify how economically and socially ...disadvantaged older adults experience well-being, including the role of life events. The findings presented here help address this gap by examining the subjective construction of well-being among urban African American adults (age ≥ 50) with Type 2 diabetes.
Method:
As part of the National Institute on Aging-funded Subjective Experience of Diabetes among Urban Older Adults study, ethnographers interviewed African American older adults with diabetes (n = 41) using an adaptation of the McGill Illness Narrative Interview. Data were coded using an inductively derived codebook. Codes related to aging, disease prognosis, and “worldview” were thematically analyzed to identify constructions of well-being.
Results:
Participants evaluate their well-being through comparisons to the past and to the illnesses of friends and family. Diabetes self-care motivates social engagement and care of others. At times, distrust of medical institutions means well-being also is established through nonadherence to suggested biomedical treatment.
Discussion:
Hardship and illness in participants’ lives frame their diabetes experience and notions of well-being. Providers need to be aware of the social, economic, and political lenses shaping diabetes self-management and subjective well-being.
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