Thinking with Maíz: A Conversation with Vick Quezada and Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra
Artist Vick Quezada and evolutionary biologist Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra both center maíz in their work despite their very different approaches. Together with M. Hamilton, these scholars explore the co-evolution of humans and maiz (corn) through the lenses of cultural history, art and performance, science, and language …
The Colonial Costs of Shipbreaking
The shipbreaking industry in Bangladesh is often hailed as an economic success story. Md. Borhan Uddin and Kimberley Thomas explain why this industry is, in fact, an extension of colonial logics …
Reggae’s Agrarian Resistance
The plantation histories and logics carried through roots reggae music inspired Carmen Andall‑Woodroofe to pursue a Ph.D. In this essay, she centers that music to examine plantation futures—and the ways reggae resists them …
El Contrato Químico
Micaela Edelson revela los costos para la salud—a menudo ocultos—que conlleva la exposición a pesticidas para los trabajadores agrícolas migrantes en Estados Unidos …
Bad Bunny’s Botanical, Eco-Rasquache Aesthetic
From sugarcane plantations to broken electricity poles, Bad Bunny presents and protests the historical and lived realities of Puerto Rico. Isaac Salazar argues that his aesthetic is a form of eco-rasquache and a celebration of collective survival under precarity …
Caring for Toxic Tobacco Cultivation Across Caribbean and Andean Colombia
In the Caribbean and Andean regions of Colombia, women and children perform(ed) the necessary labor to sustain the rural communities at the heart of toxic production of tobacco. In tracing these histories of care and toxicity, Nicolás Felipe Rueda Rey and Margarita Martínez-Osorio ask what accountability looks like today …
The “Big Pig Pyramid” and the Undoing of Rural America: A Conversation with Sonja Trom Eayrs
Trish Fisher talks with Sonja Trom Eayrs about her new book: Dodge County, Incorporated: Big Ag and the Undoing of Rural America. They discuss factory farming, political intimidation, and the corporate transformation of rural America …
Tuberous Entanglements and the Potato Empire
Tatsiana Shchurko follows potatoes through personal memories and uneven global histories. From the Andes to Belarus, she traces how the potato mediates imperial power while fueling peasant resistance and sustaining everyday life …
Do Cows Appreciate Poetry? And Other Musings On Our Bovine Friends
In these poetic fieldnotes, Mia Werger reflects on befriending feedlot cattle, surviving our broken food system, living under constraint, and dreaming of freedom …
Kelp Can Help Build More Just Futures
Lydia Lapporte traces how the project of kelp recovery in the Pacific Ocean connects to the mission of decarceration. Relational companionship and abolition ecologies can be useful for both kelp and incarcerated people …
Cafeteria Care around the World: A Conversation with Jennifer Gaddis and Sarah A. Robert
Prerna Rana speaks with Sarah Robert and Jennifer Gaddis about their new book, Transforming School Food Politics Around the World. They discuss school food programs’ catalytic potential in the betterment of global health, agriculture, and care …
Capturing Precarity & Plenty in California’s Central Valley
Through this photo exhibit, Steven Haring represents the instabilities of agriculture amid climate uncertainties, as human imposed systems seeking to enhance agricultural productivity test the limits of fluctuating natural systems …
