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Music can be used to understand and communicate about food justice and environmental justice. Communicating through music can strengthen and uplift food and environmental justice practice that is diverse in terms of epistemology, representation, and mode. Music can offer references that may speak to specific and diverse audiences, and opens the door for deeper understandings of inequity and justice in ways that step away from Eurocentric insistence on linear and written communication to teach, exchange knowledge, or debate. This multimedia event brings together four leading and inspiring thinkers, activists, and artists who connect food or environmental justice with music through their work in a panel discussion accompanied by musical samples and audience questions.
As part of the Food Studies’ program’s “Critical Food Studies and Social Justice” series and the Tishman Environment and Design Center’s Earth Week activities, “Listen Up!” centers ideas of decolonization, while recognizing that there is debate about the use of this term beyond political decolonization, and that music is not simply a commodity to be consumed, but rather, important and powerful to many communities and peoples’ understanding and communicating about the world, surviving injustices, and as a guiding light. The event will be moderated by Dr. Kristin Reynolds, Chair of Food Studies, and Mike Harrington, Assistant Director at the Tishman Environment and Design Center.
Panelists:
•Lyla June, Indigenous musician, scholar and community organizer
•Bryant Terry, James Beard & NAACP Image Award-winning chef, educator, and author
•Dr. Thomas RaShad Easley, certified diversity, equity and inclusion consultant, musical artist, educator, and Founder and CEO of Mind Heart for Diversity, LLC
•Dr. Tanya Kalmonovitch, musician, scholar, author, and Associate Professor of Music Entrepreneurship at The New School
Presented by the Food Studies Program in the Bachelor’s Program for Adults and Transfer Students within the Schools of Public Engagement, and the Tishman Environment and Design Center at The New School.
By joining this online event, you will be prompted to accept Zoom Terms of Service. If the session is recorded, you acknowledge that by participating, your name, phone number, and profile picture might be visible to the public. You can customize your personal information when creating your Zoom account. The New School may use any recorded material from the event.
Food studies scholar and nutritionist Dr. Marion Nestle has observed that food studies has continually evolved alongside the food movement, and has asked food studies to contribute to “changing the world.”[1] Dr. Psyche Williams-Forson, also a key food scholar, situated in American studies, insists on bringing an intersectional approach to food studies. She argues that intersectionality theory’s commitment to social justice and to “dismantling” unjust power structures would strengthen food studies by enabling it to better understand dynamics of the food system.[2] Critical food geographer Julie Guthman observes that food justice researchers often seek to support food movements through their work. She pushes such scholars to do so with a commitment to the integrity of engaged scholarship and scientific inquiry.[3] These influential thinkers and writers, among many others, illustrate the diversity and interdisciplinarity of food studies. Each analyzes food system issues – including as food politics, racialized and gendered dimensions of food and foodways, and the hegemony of neoliberalism in the food system, respectively—through a “critical” lens that situates food system injustices in broader social and political structures. Critical food studies helps us to understand food systems at levels deeper than the food that we eat or even the specific cultural foodways with which we may be familiar as individuals and communities. But critical thinking about the food system is decidedly not the purview of academics alone. Knowledge creation and communication occurs through many venues including design and urban planning, popular education, community organizing, and music.
Collectively these understandings can help us make sense often-complex food systems dynamics, their intertwinings in societal inequity at multiple scales, and, importantly, ways forward to a more just food system.
The Food Studies Program’s “Critical Food Studies and Social Justice” Spring 2022 Series engages with these ideas through a diverse line up of online panel discussions, keynote talks, and multimedia presentations. Please email us at foodstudies@newschool.edu for more information about upcoming events and registration.
[1] Nestle, M. 2010. Writing the Food Studies Movement. Food, Culture and Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research. 13 (2): 162-170.
[2] Williams-Forson, P. and Wilkerson, A. 2011 Intersectionality and Food Studies. Food, Culture and Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research. 14(1): 7-28.
[3] Guthman, Julie. 2008. “Bringing Good Food to Others: Investigating the Subjects of Alternative Food Practice.” Cultural Geographies. 15, no. 4: 431–47.
Made possible through an endowment from former New School Trustee John L. Tishman, the Tishman Center is a university-wide center that is committed to bringing an interdisciplinary and environmental justice approach to contemporary environmental challenges. We work under the following core areas: Advancing Climate and Environmental Justice; Supporting Progressive Innovation for Sustainability; Creating Justice and Sustainability as Core Literacies for the 21st Century. For more information, visit our website at: https://www.tishmancenter.org/
The Food Studies Program at The New School centers the connections between food, culture, social policy, and the environment, through its interdisciplinary curriculum, faculty expertise, and public event series. The degree program is open to adults, transfer students, and other nontraditional undergraduates who can earn a bachelor's degree and/or an associate in applied science (AAS) degree, exploring course subjects ranging from food systems and food media to global food security and public health issues like obesity and malnutrition. The public events spotlight cutting edge food systems issues such as “Food and Power,” “Food and the Public,” and the Spring 2022 “Critical Food and Social Justice Series.”
Committed to amplifying diverse voices, The New School offers more than a thousand public programs and events each year, providing fresh perspectives and unique learning opportunities. These lectures, exhibitions, concerts, and performances feature prominent and emerging artists, activists, and thought leaders.
To receive updates about public programs and events at The New School, subscribe to our mailing list. Visit our Livestream and YouTube channels to watch select events live and recorded.
Lyla June is an Indigenous musician, scholar and community organizer of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) and European lineages. Her dynamic, multi-genre presentation style has engaged audiences across the globe towards personal, collective and ecological healing. She blends studies in Human Ecology at Stanford, graduate work in Indigenous Pedagogy, and the traditional worldview she grew up with to inform her music, perspectives and solutions. She is currently pursuing her doctoral degree, focusing on Indigenous food systems revitalization.
TANYA KALMANOVITCH is a musician, scholar and author. Kalmanovitch’s Tar Sands Songbook, an autobiographical solo show, uses storytelling, personal history, and live music to illuminate the profound environmental and human impacts of extractivism in her birthplace of Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada. With the support of the MAP Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, Kalmanovitch is launching a multi-year performance tour along the pipeline, rail and truck routes that connect Alberta oil to global markets to accelerate community conversations about just transition. Kalmanovitch has been named to the “Grist 50 Fixers”, artist-in-residence with the Climate Action Network Canada / Réseau action climat Canada, and a member of the Mission Circle of SCALE/LeSAUT, a network mobilizing the Canadian arts and culture sector in the climate emergency. She is co-Principal Investigator of the National Endowment for the Arts Research Lab in the Sustainable Entrepreneurship in the Performing Arts at New York University and an Associate Professor of Music Entrepreneurship at The New School in New York City.
Bryant Terry is a James Beard & NAACP Image Award-winning chef, educator, and author renowned for his activism to create a healthy, just, and sustainable food system. He is editor-in-chief of 4 Color Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House and Ten Speed Press, and he is co-principal and innovation director of Zenmi, a creative studio he founded. Since 2015 he has been the Chef-in-Residence at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco where he creates public programming at the intersection of food, farming, health, activism, art, culture, and the African Diaspora. His sixth book, a collection of recipes, art, and stories, entitled Black Food was published by 4 Color Books/Ten Speed Press October 2021. It went on to be the most critically acclaimed American cookbook published that year landing on lists by The New Yorker, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, The Washington Post, Time Out, NPR, Los Angeles Times, Food52, Glamour, Vice, Epicurious, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and others. Bryant graduated from the Chef’s Training Program at the Natural Gourmet Institute for Health and Culinary Arts in New York City. He is a former Ph.D. student who holds an M.A. in History with an emphasis on the African Diaspora from NYU, where he studied under Historian Robin D.G. Kelly. He lives between Oakland and Napa Valley, California with his wife and two daughters.
Thomas RaShad Easley, Ed.D., Founder and CEO, Mind Heart for Diversity, LLC
Dr. Easley is the child of civil rights activists that protested in the children’s march in 1963 at the height of the Civil Right movement and integrated an all-white school in Toledo, Ohio. Dr. Easley was the inaugural Assistant Dean of Community and Inclusion at the School of the Environment at Yale University and the inaugural Dean of Community and Inclusion at North Carolina State University. Dr. Easley has attended Alabama A&M University for his Bachelor’s degree, Iowa State University for his Master’s degree, and North Carolina State University for his Doctorate. Dr. Easley has backgrounds in forestry, genetics, and adult education.
Dr, Easley is a certified diversity, equity and inclusion consultant that works with academic institutions, corporate entities, and other organizations to help them actualize a strong diversity initiative that welcomes everyone and shifts work culture to be equitable.
Dr. Easley is a musical artist, professor, Eagle Scout, and a former campus pastor. He intentionally merges conscious lyrics, ecumenical spirituality, land stewardship, education, diversity/equity/inclusion principles and entrepreneurial thinking in his lectures, workshops and presentations.
