Publication Date
1-1-2026
Document Type
Book
Publication Title
Seeds of Sovereignty Critical Public Health Radical Sisterhood and the Fight for Agricultural Justice
DOI
10.1093/9780197789391.001.0001
First Page
1
Last Page
184
Abstract
This book explores the historical and contemporary influence of African, Caribbean, and Black (ACB) women farmers in the fight for food justice. ACB foodways have been dismantled over time due to centuries of settler colonialism, discriminatory agricultural policies, land and knowledge theft, cultural erasure, and direct forms of violence and intimidation—creating vast inequities in today’s food system. At the same time, mainstream public health responses to food insecurity and access in ACB communities often focus on short-term solutions that do not empower local communities and keep the status quo intact. These approaches overlook the broader structural constraints that maintain and reproduce food inequities and fail to recognize the unique assets in local and global ACB communities—such as their capacity to grow and distribute their own food, solve food production disparities, and restore frayed transnational cultural foodways. Through a case study of the National Women in Agriculture Association (NWIAA), a grassroots-based, women-led farming advocacy collective, the book examines the historical lived experiences, political voice, and locally situated knowledge of ACB women farmers, and their capacity to support food security and suture frayed foodways. The women’s perspectives offer an innovative and emancipatory model for rethinking asset-based, upstream public health interventions, particularly those focused on low-income communities and communities of color. At the same time, it documents the structural limitations of community-based, multi-sector political organizing and advocacy strategies as they are situated within inequitable social relations.
Keywords
African, agriculture, Caribbean and Black (ACB) women farmers, community organizing, ethnicity, food justice, political advocacy, public health, race
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Department
Communication Studies
Recommended Citation
Andrew L. Carter. "Seeds of Sovereignty: Critical Public Health, Radical Sisterhood, and the Fight for Agricultural Justice" Seeds of Sovereignty Critical Public Health Radical Sisterhood and the Fight for Agricultural Justice (2026): 1-184. https://doi.org/10.1093/9780197789391.001.0001
