Sowing Abolition: Reimagining Agricultural Education in the Afterlife of Slavery
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5032/jae.v67i2.3292Keywords:
Abolition, Justice, Decolonial pedagogy, Anti-Blackness, Food justiceAbstract
Educational practices around agriculture and food must reckon with the enduring legacy of slavery and racial oppression in the food system. This manuscript explores how agricultural and food-based education can be taught with the legacy of slavery in mind and envisions what an abolitionist agricultural education might entail. Blending scholarly analysis with an activist orientation, I draw on critical race theory, food justice scholarship, and decolonial thought to argue that teaching food and farming cannot be taught independently from historical and ongoing structures of anti-Black racism and colonialism. Key thinkers such as Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, Frank Wilderson, Frantz Fanon, and Walter Rodney provide a theoretical framework for understanding how Black experiences, knowledge, and struggles inform a transformative pedagogy. I articulate an abolitionist agricultural education as one that centers Black and Indigenous epistemologies, addresses the afterlife of slavery in contemporary food injustice, and engages youth in civic action through school-based and community gardening.
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