Publication

With partners at UNITED PURPOSE Bangladesh, we recently had a collaborative  article published in a special issue of  the University of California open access journal, Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene. The theme was "Ways of knowing and being for agroecology transitions" and was guest edited by Maywa Montenegro de Wit, University of California, Santa Cruz, Colin R. Anderson, University of Vermont, Francisco Rosado-May, Universidad Intercultural Maya de Quintana Roo, Lauren Baker, Global Alliance for the Future of Food, and Amanda Jekums, Global Alliance for the Future of Food. 
Available to read here. 
And here's the abstract:
How can civil society support community-based organizing that puts ways of knowing and being at the heart of food systems change? Drawing upon a collaboration between 2 nonprofit organizations and a community-based network of rural women across Bangladesh, this essay explores frictions and contradictions that trouble our efforts to co-create knowledge for agroecological transformations. Rather than suggesting these troubles can be resolved, we attempt to stay with them in this article, locating them as vital disruptions to the hegemonic order of one-world-making. Using personal vignettes as framing devices, we combine critical analysis, art, and poetry to explore working with and within a plurality of ways of knowing and being. With a vignette about soil, we begin with unsettling questions about what constitutes knowledge in a world where constructs of truth and belief rub up against each other. We then tension this in the context of agroecological markets and social justice activism as these intersect with different notions of relationality. We pursue this further by introducing a narrative-framing tool called a “value web” which mobilizes both material and immaterial domains of agroecology. Finally, we conclude by examining the role of international civil society in food system transformation and raising fundamental questions of allyship which help us navigate the constitutive contradictions of knowledge co-creation.