Black Food Futures with Dr. Ashanté Reese
Food highlights a living paradox: it represents the key ingredient that binds us together, yet divides us when power dynamics and privilege are at play. By shedding light on these intricate realities, the Food for Thought Lecture Series seeks to problematize and critically assess the complex social, cultural, environmental, and political relationships that we have with food. Join the Colby Center for the Arts and Humanities on April 10 for a conversation with Dr. Ashanté Reese.
Dr. Ashanté Reese is assistant professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. She earned a PhD in Anthropology from American University and a bachelors of arts in History with a minor in African American studies from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Broadly speaking, Dr. Reese works at the intersection of critical food studies and Black geographies, examining the ways Black people produce and navigate food- related spaces despite anti-Blackness. Animated by the question, who and what survives?, much of Dr. Reese’s work has focused on the everyday strategies Black people employ while navigating inequity. Her first book, Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C., takes up these themes through an ethnographic exploration of anti- Blackness and food access. Black Food Geographies won the 2020 Best Monograph Award from the Association for the Study of Food and Society. Her second book, Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice, is a collection co-edited with Hanna Garth that explores the geographic, social, and cultural dimensions of food in Black life across the U.S. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Mellon foundation and has been published in a variety of academic and public venues: Antipode, Human Geography, the Oxford American, and Gravy Magazine among others.
Register here: https://colby.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMocO-grDMqGdwhwh60r8d8difEccra1Lkl.