Black Food Sovereignty
- shakara tyler saba
- Pronouns
- she/her
GRADUATE | This syllabus explores Black Food Sovereignty as a grassroots movement from historical and contemporary lenses. The goal of this course is to develop an analysis of Blackness as praxis, food, farming, and land-based work as methods of resistance and practical implementations of justice.
The course will examine philosophies of Blackness, historical and current case studies of Black food sovereignty throughout the African Diaspora including cooperative and other institutional formations. Students will also develop an understanding of (anti-)blackness from axiological, cosmological, epistemological, and methodological perspectives. This syllabus facilitates an understanding of the historical and contemporary factors that shape Black food sovereignty movements as unapologetic demands for Black liberation undergirded by community self-determination and empowerment.
About
shakara tyler is a returning-generation farmer, educator and organizer who engages in Black agrarianism, agroecology, food sovereignty and environmental justice as commitments of abolition and decolonization. She obtained her PhD at Michigan State University in Community Sustainability (CSUS) and works with Black farming communities in Michigan and the Mid-Atlantic. She explores participatory and decolonial research methodologies and community-centered pedagogies in the food justice, food sovereignty and environmental justice movements. She is the Co-Executive Director of the Detroit Black Community Food Sovereignty Network (DBCFSN), board member of the Detroit People’s Food Co-op (DPFC) and co-founder of the Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund (DBFLF) and a member of the Black Dirt Farm Collective (BDFC) and a Lecturer at the University of Michigan in School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS).