MUSIC INITIATIVE

The Understanding Global Food and Environmental Justice through Music Initiative (2022 - ongoing)

in collaboration with Mike Harrington

Music can be used to understand and communicate about social justice as it relates to food, agriculture, and the environment. Communicating through music can strengthen and uplift food and environmental justice practice that is diverse in terms of epistemology, representation, and mode. Music can offer references that may speak to specific and diverse audiences, and open the door for deeper understandings of inequity and justice in ways that step away from Eurocentric insistence on linear and written communication to teach, exchange knowledge, or debate.

Building on public programs that we have organized through our roles in the Food Studies Program and The Tishman Environment and Design Center beginning in 2022, and now joined by the Food and Social Justice Action Research Lab, this initiative at The New School explores music as a way to understand structural and historical inequities in the food system, and as a source of strength and power among those fighting against oppression.

The Understanding Global Food and Environmental Justice through Music Initiative gathers inspiration from, among others, the concept of ‘DJ Scholarship,’ coined by DJ Lynnée Denise (2019).* Including, but extending beyond DJ practice to apply to music in its many forms, the Initiative underscores the importance of music in liberatory praxis in food and environmental systems -  historically, in the present, and into the future.

* Denise (2019) The Afterlife of Aretha Franklin's “Rock Steady:” A Case Study in DJ Scholarship, The Black Scholar, 49:3, 62-72, DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2019.1619122

Events and speaking engagements to-date:

Online event: Why Willie Mae Thornton Matters: A Multi-Media Book Panel (2024)

Music can open the door for deeper understandings of inequity and justice in ways that step away from Eurocentric insistence on linear and written communication to teach, exchange knowledge, or debate. This event explored these modes of understanding and resistance through a multi-media discussion of Lynnée Denise’s 2023 book Why Willie Mae Thornton Matters (University of Texas Press).

Online event: Magdalena: a Threatened River of Music, Knowledge and Culture (2022)

This event hosted a conversation about the environment, history, and culture of the Magdalena River, the main River of Colombia. It featured people speakers who have intimate knowledge of how the river has shaped not only the history and culture of Colombia but also the world.

Online event: Listen up! Understanding Food Justice and Environmental Justice Through Music (2022)

As part of the Food Studies’ program’s “Critical Food Studies and Social Justice” series and the Tishman Environment and Design Center’s Earth Week activities, “Listen Up!” centered ideas of decolonization while recognizing that there is debate about the use of this term beyond political decolonization and that music is not simply a commodity to be consumed, but rather, important and powerful to many communities and peoples’ understanding and communicating about the world, surviving injustices, and as a guiding light. The event was moderated by Dr. Kristin Reynolds, Chair of Food Studies, and Mike Harrington, Assistant Director at the Tishman Environment and Design Center.

Other Events:

Mike speaking on climate justice at the Afropunk Festival in Brooklyn (2023)