Back to the Roots

Memory, Inequality, and Urban Agriculture

By Sara Shostak

SERIES: Nature, Society, and Culture

Rutgers University Press

Across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, urban farmers and gardeners are reclaiming cultural traditions linked to food, farming, and health; challenging systemic racism and injustice in the food system; demanding greater community control of resources in marginalized neighborhoods; and moving towards their visions of more equitable urban futures. As part of this urgent work, urban farmers and gardeners encounter and reckon with both the cultural meanings and material legacies of the past. Drawing on their narratives, Back to the Roots demonstrates that urban agriculture is a critical domain for explorations of, and challenges to, the long standing inequalities that shape both the materiality of cities and the bodies of their inhabitants.

A timely, creative, and comprehensive portrait of urban farming that offers a vivid and theoretically sophisticated account of how memory and meaning making shape cities. This is a must-read for those interested in urban agriculture, as well as those who care about memory, culture, and place. Japonica Brown-Saracino, author of How Places Make Us: Novel LBQ Identities in Four Small Cities

'Back to the Roots lays bare the simultaneous and contradictory pull of love, community, tenacity, inequity, frustration, and hope that propels urban agriculture, as well as the critical need for greater accountability, inclusion, and equity.' Laura Lawson, author of City Bountiful: A Century of Community Gardening in America

Drawing on their narratives, Back to the Roots demonstrates that urban agriculture is a critical domain for explorations of, and challenges to, the long standing inequalities that shape both the materiality of cities and the bodies of their inhabitants. American Sociological Association - Environmental Sociology News

Author: Health equity and racial justice grow alongside the vegetables at Massachusetts urban farms' by Carrie Healy New England Public Media

SARA SHOSTAK is an associate professor at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, where she teaches in the Department of Sociology and the Health: Science, Society and Policy Program.

Introduction
1 Cultivating the Commonwealth
2 The Powers of Food
3 Lineages and Land
4 Stories of the Soil
5 Urban Futures
Conclusion
Epilogue
Appendix A: Into the Field: Data and Methods
Appendix B: Research and Reflexivity
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index

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