Love as praxis: Academic and activist pathways to food justice

Abstract

Christine Porter often argued for flipping the script in academia so that community leaders do more of the talking—to reveal their instinctual social theo­ries. This special issue honoring Christine’s work feels like the perfect opportunity to do so with an interview I told her about that left an indelible impression on me, with Detroit food justice activist Charity Hicks. I was struck by the similarities in Charity’s and Christine’s strategies for leading food systems change from two distinct but complemen­tary positions: one a scholar trying to break down “academic supremacy” to leverage the resources and skillsets of academics to be of genuine use to historically marginalized and exploited communi­ties, and the other an activist working to instigate structural change while building the tools for grass­roots voices to assert their own agency. What seemed to unite their approaches is a logic that guided Christine’s work: epistemological, ethical, and emotional rigor. Three aspects of this essay offer insights about strategies for transforming food systems: the content of Charity’s interview itself in the larger context of Detroit’s food move­ment, the long-form format of quoting Charity at length, and the comparison between Charity’s and Christine’s perspectives. Far from an abstract ideal, the love as praxis that drove Christine and Char­ity’s work—based on practical strategies like a rela­tional root cause analysis, ethical humility, and emotional rigor—should fuel scholars and activists to “leverage the food system,” as Charity put it, to navigate this precarious politi­cal moment to collectively build something better.