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In this article we put the themes of gender, agency, food tradition, and time, which are central to the food studies literature into conversation with the research on aging and food security to offer an intersectional analysis of older African-American women’s foodways. In particular, we explore how income, age, gender, and time intertwine to inform older African-American women’s everyday actions and activities related to food provisioning, including shopping, cooking, and eating. Grounding our analysis in a “food tense” perspective, we examine how past experiences shape current food acquisition strategies and preferences, and how seniors’ desires for health and longevity serve as a cornerstone of future foodways. Further, we consider food tradition, food knowledge, and thrifty know-how, as a forms of gendered cultural capital, that generate alternative resources, meanings, and explanations of older women’s foodways. This multidimensional and future inclusive approach to understanding seniors’ food resources not only challenges the point-in-time, income-expenditure, and life course frameworks used in food security research, but provides insights into the complex and fluid factors that shape seniors’ orientation and relationship to food.

Introduction, Tracce Urbane. Rivista Italiana Transdisciplinare di Studi Urbani, N. 8 (2020): FARE E CONOSCERE, INSIEME: SUPERARE GLI OSTACOLI E LE SFIDE DELLA RICERCA-AZIONE PER RENDERE IL MONDO UN POSTO MIGLIORE / TO DO AND KNOW SOMETHING TOGETHER: OVERCOMING THE CHALLENGES OF ACTION-RESEARCH IN MAKING BETTER URBAN WORLDS

This paper critically examines the Choice Neighborhoods Planning Initiative that was carried out in the Vance Avenue Neighborhood in Memphis Tennessee (USA). It tells the story of the involvements of a coalition of 25 neighborhood organizations in partnership with the City and Regional Planning (CRP) Department at the University of Memphis – called the Vance Avenue Collaborative (VAC) – in the CN Planning Initiative. Launched in 2011 with significant community support, the CN Planning Initiative ended in 2013 with a resident-led oppositional planning effort that challenged the institutional plan. The VAC story explores some of the pitfalls that might arise in institutionally-created spaces for citizen participation, by revealing the broad range of tactics used by public officials to marginalize democratic citizen participation. Based on the issues that emerged during the CN Planning Initiative, the VAC created alternative strategies to respond to those generated through institutional planning. These counter-strategies, framed in Advocacy Planning and Action Research approaches were able to secure some important achievements along the way and might be useful for communities within publicly sponsored urban revitalization efforts.

This article explores what an uneven embrace of community engagement means for faculty as they apply for tenure and promotion. It closely examines how three faculty members (including the author) from different departments framed and discussed their engaged scholarly contributions in the presence or absence of departmental guidelines on engaged scholarship. Their experiences and success reveal the influence of departmental context on decisions to include engagement in faculty evaluation criteria and the importance of finding strategies to mitigate the absence or underdevelopment of guidelines.

Although often intended to address injustices in food access, farmers markets tend to cater to affluent communities, and to exclude on the basis of race and class. One means of addressing this is federal subsidy programs, like the Senior Farmers Market Nutritional Program (SFMNP). We explore the dynamics of the SFMNP program in Memphis’ farmers market landscape in 2011. We examine the visible barriers experienced by SFMNP patrons to market access including delays in establishing the program in a largely African-American neighborhood, and the more subtle barriers such as perceptions of more affluent markets as white spaces. We then explore some successful efforts to make these issues visible and address them, including activism on the part of seniors and public dialog in social media. Despite this, we find that ongoing resistance to acknowledging farmers markets as spaces of racial inequality continues to challenge their food justice potential.

Limited access to fruits and vegetables is an issue for many low-income and minority neighborhoods and likely plays an important role in the development of health disparities. Local farmers' markets are a growing response to low-quality food environments, but can improve food security only if they are sustainable over the long term and broadly accessible to residents. The South Memphis Farmers Market emerged as one of the first actions from a participatory neighborhood planning and revitalization effort involving local nonprofits, neighborhood residents, and faculty and students from the University of Memphis in 2010, and maintains a local advisory committee to help tailor operational decisions to the neighborhood context. This paper is based on 2011 data from an ongoing mixed-methods evaluation of the market, designed to assess whether it is meeting the goals outlined in the neighborhood plan in terms of serving as an accessible source of fresh fruits and vegetables, and whether any changes to market policies are necessary to ensure its sustainability. This paper examines ethnographic data collected during participant observation in advisory committee meetings and during market hours, and quantitative data from an end-of-season survey of market shoppers. The analysis suggests that the market is expanding neighborhood access to produce, and that the guidance provided by the advisory committee has been essential to this success. It also highlights possible barriers to access and potential policy interventions to address them.

Aboriginal people in Australia construct their identities in relationship to a state and public imaginary that places primacy on celebrating and preserving “traditional culture” and in turn regularly fails to recognize the impact of colonial history, state constructed definitions, and indigenous modes of identification. For Kooris in the suburban Sydney community of La Perouse, claiming and legitimating Aboriginality can be particularly challenging; they are suburban rather than urban or rural, neither assimilated nor traditional, and Black, but always suspect of being White. This article examines how urban Aboriginal identity is negotiated among/between Aboriginal people and the socio-political conditions that make this negotiation necessary, desirable, but sometimes risky. I explore the ways in which Kooris variously asserted their Aboriginality through their bodies, practices, and politics along a continuum of identity construction. I argue that Kooris move between affirming cultural belonging and differentiating between indigenous cultural styles, histories, and geographies. I suggest how constructions of intra-Aboriginal sameness and difference take us behind the veil of recognition and allow us to consider Aboriginal identity constructions as forms of indigenous knowledge production that can reproduce, speak back to, and sometimes shift, the geographic, racial, political, and cultural boundaries that underlie prevailing state policies and popular ideas about Aboriginal cultural identity and authenticity.

Over the past 2 decades, the form and function of teaching, research, and service activities labeled as community and civic engagement has increased. At the University of Memphis, the evolution of engaged scholarship has been strongly influenced by the grassroots-level participation of faculty who embraced service learning as an integral component of the engaged scholarship process centered on building community partnerships. In this article, we outline the history of service learning and community engagement at the University of Memphis resulting in the Strengthening Communities Initiative and suggest the role of internal social movements in transforming institutions of higher education and communities. Our model calls for program-initiated service learning, reciprocal partnerships, and institution-level changes to support engaged teaching and scholarship. Such a transformation requires visionary leadership at the institutional level, external demands for new thinking and acting, and a critical mass of e...

This article examines the role and methodologies of the anthropologist as practitioner working in faith-based development initiatives. In particular, the author discusses attempts to use a participatory action research (PAR) model to examine the current programs, congregational participation, and future community development activities of Saint Andrew African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. The article examines how the FBO's traditional model of community development interfaced with the university research team's participatory approach and shaped the way that research was carried out. Additionally, the author discusses the varying ways that she, as an anthropologist, and her methods were positioned and the process of negotiating a mutually acceptable methodology. This FBO-university partnership revealed several key issues that have relevance for anthropologists engaged in work with FBOs and beyond. First, the model of faith-based community development shapes the possibilities of the work. Second, it shows how the anthropologist, and university partners more generally, are positioned by the organization, informs how and by whom the data is collected, what data is collected, and how it is used. Finally, there is no longer room for anthropologists to work alone; community issues and agency demands are complex and require interdisciplinary collaborative responses.

This paper uses the repatriation and ceremonial reburial of Indigenous remains to La Perouse, an Indigenous community in Sydney, as a lens through which to examine the cultural politics of representation and recognition that are central to contemporary Aboriginal identity construction. The return of the skeletal remains of 21 individuals highlights the role that representative bodies — past and present, individual and organizational — play in engagements between the State and Aboriginal people. Heralded by some as a sincere sign of reconciliation and treated as suspect and misguided by others, the reburial produced diverse responses from both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people alike. Speakers at the repatriation focused on righting the wrongs of the past, reconciliation, and moving forward in cooperation, suggesting the redemptive significance of these events. Among Kooris at La Perouse, debates about community, representation, and belonging expose the ways that Aboriginal people and communities operate through, against, and beyond ‘whitefella’ structures of recognition to define who they are and what their culture is.

Thomson of Arnhem Land. 2000. 55 minutes. Directed by John Moore. Distributed by First Run/Icarus Films, 32 Court Street, 21st floor, Brooklyn, N.Y., USA 11201. 718-488-8900, info@frif.com