Urban Food Justice and the Immigrant-Food Nexus with prof. Julian Agyeman

On the 10th of February MIGFOODCITY is hosting a seminar on Urban Food Justice and the Immigrant-Food Nexus with prof. Julian Agyeman

Abstract

How can food inform us about the everyday lives, agency and well-being of urban residents with a migration background in Dutch and European cities? Research on urban foodscapes in the Netherlands and other continental European countries mainly focuses on the potential of ‘local’, ‘sustainable’ and ‘alternative’ food systems, foodways and initiatives. While professor Agyeman has extensively addressed the intersections between race, class and sustainability in his research on urban foodscapes in U.S. cities, these critical intersections are often overlooked in urban food research in European countries.

Yet, in the face of increasing socio-spatial inequalities, gentrification processes and stringent migration regimes in the Netherlands and Europe, it is imperative to ask how everyday urban environments, foodscapes and migration relate to each other. How do migrants’ food practices and materialities in public space intersect with processes of racialisation and stigmatisation? How are these challenged by migrants, but also used as legitimate basis for displacement and exclusions from dominant ‘sustainable food’ narratives?

In this seminar, prof. Agyeman will join us online from the US and share with us his critical perspectives, expertise and research on urban food justice and antiracist planning in, and for, intercultural cities, including his influential writings on Food Justice: Race, Class and Sustainability; Food Trucks, Cultural Identity and Social Justice; and The Immigrant-Food Nexus: Borders, Labor, and Identity in North America.

Bio

Julian Agyeman Ph.D. FRSA FRGS is a Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning, and is the Fletcher Professor of Rhetoric and Debate, an endowed chair at Tufts University. He is the originator of the increasingly influential concept of just sustainabilities, which explores the increasingly intersecting goals of social justice and environmental sustainability. He identifies himself as a critical urban planning and environmental social science scholar. He centers his research on critical explorations of the complex and embodied relations between humans and the urban environment, whether mediated by governments or social movement organizations, and their effects on public policy and planning processes and outcomes, particularly in relation to notions of justice and equity.

More about the MIGFOODCITY project

The Migration, Food and the Inclusive City project seeks to examine what role urban food practices play in everyday integration and transformation processes of migrants in cities. More specifically, the project addresses (i) how migrants produce and negotiate the nature of urban public spaces and urban identities through food and (ii) how migrant foodscapes stand in relation to processes of urban regeneration. MIGFOODCITY is funded by a UU Migration and Societal Change seed money grant.