Environmental Studies Seminar Series | North Stars of Emancipation: Navigating Movements and Institutions to Change Food Systems

In person and via Zoom (Meeting ID: 978 5545 8946, Passcode: 454736). 

If you are unable to stream the talk live and need to access a recorded version, please contact Stacy Philpott at sphilpot@ucsc.edu. A UC Santa Cruz email address is required to access the recording.

Host: Stacy Philpott

Speaker: Antonio Roman-Alcala, CSU East Bay

Title: North Stars of Emancipation: Navigating Movements and Institutions to Change Food Systems

Abstract: In this talk, Dr. Roman-Alcalá will discuss his new book North Stars of Emancipation: California’s Diverse Food and Farming Movements in Times of Racial Reckoning, based on his twenty years of engaging such movements as both participant and (more recently) researcher. The book addresses how food movements’ racial politics and change-making strategies have shifted over recent decades, in response to the interventions of activists and allies, and in relation to the ever-vexing challenge of working across various kinds of difference. Antonio will present insights from North Stars, illuminating the origins of right wing populist political strategies in California’s agrarian history, dynamics of contemporary movement organizing among ecological farmers, farmworkers, Indigenous people, food justice activists, nonprofit staff, researchers, and others, and suggestions for how to both diversify and strengthen the movement. Addressing social scientific and social movement debates about if and how social movements should seek radical change to society, and how movements might navigate problematic political and economic systems not set up to serve them, the talk will introduce the book’s call for a “North Star” approach to political change. Such an approach, Antonio argues, can leverage food markets and state policy even while seeking a food system (and world) beyond capitalism and the colonial nation-state.