Skip to main content

Sociology Colloquium, 4/28/2021

Community Food Security & Food Justice

Dr. Monica M. White, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Dr. Monica White

Dr. Monica White

Dr. Monica M. White is Associate Professor of Environmental Justice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a joint appointment in the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology.

Her research engages communities of color and grassroots organizations that are involved in the development of sustainable community food systems as a strategy to respond to issues of hunger and food inaccessibility. Her publications include, “Sisters of the Soil: Urban Gardening as Resistance Among Black Women in Detroit” and “D-Town Farm: African American Resistance to Food Insecurity and the Transformation of Detroit.” Her first book, Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) which contextualizes new forms of contemporary urban agriculture within the historical legacies of African American farmers who fought to acquire and stay on the land. Using historical and contemporary examples (including George Washington Carver, Fannie Lou Hamer, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, and the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network), the book examines the development of farmers’ cooperatives as strategies of resistance, and documents the ways that these organizations, in general, and Black farmers specifically, have contributed to the Black Freedom Movement. Freedom Farmers is the winner of the 2019 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Book Award, Society for the Study of Social Problems, Division on Racial and Ethnic Minorities, and the

2020 Association for the Study of Food and Society First Book Award.

UNC Press book page (https://uncpress.org/book/9781469643700/freedom-farmers/)

Dr. White’s personal website (http://monicamariewhite.com)

April 28, 2021
Wednesday, 12–1:30pm
Zoom session
Meeting ID: 912 5613 7575
Passcode: 828944

If you cannot join with video, you can connect to the Zoom session via phone: 1–346–248–7799