Our Communities
This work centers on community resilience, human security, and strengthening the foundational pillars of society to foster long-term stability in underresourced communities.
food & agriculture · housing & infrastructure · disaster · violence
Food & Agriculture
Readings
- Morales, Alfanso. 2011. “Growing Food and Justice” in Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability. (book chapter)
- Scalan, Stephan J. and Sam Regas. 2018. “Food Deserts and Injustice: Poverty, Food Insecurity, and Food Sovereignty in Three Rust Belt Cities” in Food and Poverty: Food Insecurity and Food Sovereignty among America’s Poor. (book chapter)
- White, Monica M. 2018. Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement. (book)
- Quizar, Jessi. “WORKING TO LIVE: Black-Led Farming in Detroit’s Racialized Economy” in Working Ecologies. (book chapter)
- Block, Daniel et al. (2012). “Food sovereignty, urban food access, and food activism: Contemplating the connections through examples from Chicago.” Agriculture and Human Values 29(2): 203-215.
- Penniman, L. (2018). Farming while black: Soul fire farm’s practical guide to liberation on the land. Chelsea Green Publishing
- UIC Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy (2025) “Hunger Pains: Assessing Food Access for Unhoused Individuals in Illinois”
Multimedia
- Allen, Erika. TEDxChicago: “Environmental Alchemy for Sustainable Food Systems.” youtube.com/watch?v=i28h4aRRNX8
- Seeds (film about Black farmers, director from Dayton)
- Farming while Black (film) farmingwhileblackfilm.com
- Monica M. White featured on episode of A Hunger Society to discuss her book Freedom Farmers youtube.com/watch?v=WujibHOPFGM
Organizations
- Urban Growers Collective (Chicago)
- Frogtown Farm (St. Paul)
- Midwest Farmers of Color Collective
Other Resources
Fellow Projects
- Liv Furman, “3 Sistas Garden Project We Go.”
- Dinah L. George, “Seed Keeping for the African Diaspora.”
- Kaleb Lee, “Seeds of Resilience: A Community Seed Library for Highland.”
- Kelley Lemon, “The Landscape Remembers: Voices of the Southern Bottomlands.”
Housing & Infrastructure
Readings
- Brown, Adrienne. The Residential is Racial: The Perceptual History of Mass Homeownership. (book)
- Browne, Adrienne. 2-18. “Appraisal Narratives: Reading Race on the Midcentury Block.” American Quarterly (academic article)
- Parker, Molly. 2019. “Inside Public Housing Where Cockroaches Drop From the Wall and Kids are Getting Sick.” (news article) — propublica.org/article/inside-public-housing-where-cockroaches-drop-from-the-wall-and-kids-are-getting-sick
- Taylor, Dorceta (2014) The rise of racially restrictive covenants. In Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility. New York University Press. Pp. 110-127
- Cashin, S. (2022). White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality. Beacon.
- Pulido, Laura. “Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers (2000)
- Bullard, Robert. Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality. Westview Press, 2000.
- Schell, C. J., Dyson, K., Fuentes, T. L., Des Roches, S., Harris, N. C., Miller, D. S., … & Lambert, M. R. (2020). The ecological and evolutionary consequences of systemic racism in urban environments. Science, 369(6510),
- Dorceta Taylor. 2014. Toxic Communities: Environmental racism, industrial pollution, and residential mobility
- UIC Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy (2023) “Black Homelessness in Illinois: Structural Drivers of Inequality”
- Beth Schlemper, M., Sujata Shetty, Owusua Yamoah, Kevin Czajkowski, and Victoria Stewart. 2025. “Culturally Responsive Teaching through Spatial Justice in Urban Neighborhoods.” Urban Education 60 (2): 343–77. doi-org.proxy.cc.uic.edu/10.1177/00420859231153411.
Multimedia
- Podcast episode: Hidden Brain, “Zipcode Destiny: The Persistent Power of Place and Education”
- Tonika Lewis Johnson, Folded Map Project (website/Youtube video) foldedmapproject.com
- WTTW. 2023. The Boss and The Bulldozer (documentary) wttw.com/chicago-stories/boss-and-the-bulldozer/video?v=boss-and-bulldozer
- Shame of Chicago, Shame of the Nation (2024) (4-part docu-series) shameofchicagodoc.org
Organizations
Other Resources
- Tonika Lewis Johnson tonijphotography.com
Fellow Projects
- Kaaha Kaahiye, “Everything is Environmental.”
- Nateya Taylor, “Beyond the Grocery Store: An Audiovisual Essay of Food Apartheid and Community Power in Milwaukee.”
Disaster
Readings
- Jacobs, Fayola. 2-19. “Black feminism and radical planning: New directions for disaster planning research.” Planning Theory, 18(1):24-39. (academic article)
- A Queer/Trans Guides to Hurricane Season (zine)
- Klinenberg, Eric. (1665). Heatwave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago. (book)
Multimedia
- Helfhand, Judith (2020) — Cooked: Survival by Zip Code. Documentary film.
Organizations
Violence
Readings
- Pellow, David N. 2025. “States of Confinement and Ecological Violence: Incarceration and the Struggle for Environmental Justice” in Not Just Green, Not Just White: Race, Justice, and Environmental History.
- Menakem, R. (2021). My grandmother’s hands: Racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies. Penguin UK. (book)
- Kara, S. (2023). Cobalt red: How the blood of the Congo powers our lives. St. Martin’s Press. (book)
Multimedia
- Gorman, A. (2018). Earthrise. The Climate Reality Project. (video poem)
- Raoul Peck (2020). Exterminate all the Brutes, Parts 1-4. (film)