In the first virtual roundtable interview for this page, Alanna Higgins discusses activism and advocacy with Willa Zhen, Darcy Mullen, and Vanessa Garcia Polanco. Darcy, Vanessa, and Willa share their experiences, insight, and practical advice about engaging in activism during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Vanessa García Polanco is a scholar-activist passionate about advocating for minorities, immigrants, and refugees in food, agriculture, the environment, and natural resources. She graduated from Michigan State University’s Department of Community Sustainability focusing on Community Agriculture and Food Systems. Garcia Polanco is a 2020 Michigan Junior Food System Leader of the Year and 2019 James Beard Foundation Scholar. Find her on Twitter as @vgpvisions.
Dr. Darcy Mullen is a Postdoctoral Marion L. Brittain Fellow at Georgia Institute of Technology. Mullen’s research has a strong interdisciplinary focus on the Rhetoric of Food, and Social Movement Studies. Her recent publications explore the use of “local” as a tool for cartography in the local food movement, the politics of place and pedagogies in disability studies. She blogs for Tech-style, and Pedagogy and American Literary Studies. Mullen is working on a graphic novel about endometriosis.
Dr. Willa Zhen is a Professor of Liberal Arts at The Culinary Institute of America, where she is teaching as part of CIA’s Applied Food Studies bachelor’s program. Zhen recently authored “Food Studies: A Hands-On Guide” and has received awards from the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery and the Culinary Historians of New York, among others.
What does activism and/or advocacy mean to you? Do you see a distinction between them? Why do you think that they’re important?
Willa: Activism and advocacy are close cousins, but to me activism means doing something while advocacy means speaking on behalf or speaking for something. I’m an anthropologist by training and in some anthropological thinking advocacy can be a little dangerous, in that sometimes you can end up speaking over someone else, particularly someone who may have more expertise or experience with an issue. It might be well intentioned, but it can be a slippery slope. Regardless, getting involved and doing something is important because it forces you to get out of your own head really quickly that your concerns are the most important in the world. It doesn’t mean that your particular needs don’t matter, but it does create a sense of empathy that there’s other things going on and that maybe there are issues or needs that you hadn’t thought of prior to being exposed.
Vanessa: For me both are about using your power, privileges and resources to enact change. Activism can be organizing, bringing people together, asking the difficult questions and speaking up. In advocacy, I make sure to speak from my perspective and from the communities I belong, the ones that claim me and the ones that give me permission to share their stories. Being an advocate is also realizing when you are the right person to advocate for something. Sometimes the best thing you can do as an advocate is to share your power and allow/ enable others to speak for themselves.
Darcy: I’m a rhetorician by training so I also see them as close family in that they both are in service of activation–activating something. It’s helpful for me to think about the practices and methodologies that both activate in the classroom. I see my role as a teacher (scholar/activist) to teach my students how to advocate for themselves, their communities, and those in the community that don’t have privilege. I teach the history of food activism so they know the history of “Doing The Work.” In the classroom we have low-stakes opportunities to practice doing the work in a responsible way. As a scholar (advocate/teacher) my responsibility is to participate in meaningful research that hopefully makes others curious about the connections between language, food and activism. Sometimes that means figuring out the balance of being critical towards activism with BIG problems without dumping the baby out with that bath water.
How do you think that we as academics could (better, more) build in these activities to our teaching, learning, and research?
Willa: I did my graduate work in the UK and even at the institutions where I went, where there was a good amount of activism, there was still this sentiment among faculty that academic work — research, in particular — should come before any activism or advocacy work. Now I definitely had colleagues and faculty members who blended research, teaching, and advocacy but, but there was a sense that one happened at this block of time and the other happened during another. And I get why there’s this separation, particularly as academic employment has become incredibly precarious and you don’t want anything to be used against you as a candidate for a potential job opportunity or funding opportunity. I think it’s also hard to build in advocacy and activism if you’re a new faculty member, a contingent faculty member, BIPOC (black, indigenous, person of color), queer, or a member of any other population/status that makes you more vulnerable. Doing advocacy/activism can be viewed by some as self-serving, indulgent, or unserious. So I think conversations like these are good — to support and amplify advocacy and activism, and to show that this is a serious and important endeavor.
Activism and advocacy doesn’t always have to be a BIG THING, as I tell my students. I think sometimes they feel like they have to do something earth-shaking in order to make a change, to be a Greta Thunberg to do something. I think that sets people up for failure if you think only big actions make a difference. It could be small steps, like giving students from underrepresented groups a chance to speak first in class discussions so their voices don’t get drowned out, it could be rethinking your syllabus to focus on more underrepresented groups, it could be citing black women… and the list goes on.
Vanessa: As academics, one of the first spaces we can bring advocacy and activism into is by embracing community engaged research principles, when regardless of who we are working with or doing research at, we address power dynamics, ethical considerations and outcomes about place and people. It is about being better researchers who want their research to have a positive impact beyond our interests and the circles of the ivory tower. A simple exercise for me is to match my research goals with the Sustainable Development Goals, and/or the vision and planning documents of the place and people I am collaborating with. Something really important to me, and as part of my community engaged research principles, is being a public scholar. It is about always reminding people in academia and the public what your research’s broader impacts are and the things in society that you want to highlight and hopefully address. One thing we could all do more of is being public scholars and research communicators. It is easy to think about what journals you are going to publish your research or what academic conferences are you going to present at, but we should also think about what newspaper articles, policy briefs, and so much more.
Darcy: For teaching, I teach service-learning classes that are perhaps misunderstood as “activism classes.” We have partnered with a variety of agencies from local farms to local government agencies in doing assignments that ask students to explore what different communication strategies are needed by different groups in order for them to reach their goals. The most important practice in service-learning classes is learn your communities’ needs and figure out how you can help with that need–not a (probably well intentioned) need assigned on or to the community. We call that bulldozing. We work from an asset-based model versus a deficit-based model. A community knows what they need.
For research, honestly, I am still figuring this out. To echo my wonderful colleagues here, public facing work matters so much. I love what I read when I’m reviewing for journals. And I love what I read other scholars putting out into other journals! I love the books my peers are putting out. I currently struggle with methodology and the move of “standing on the shoulders of giants” to legitimize the writing. I want to see more academic spaces that celebrate collaborative writing between activist-academics and our community partners. I want to see more acceptance of methodologies that emerge from Doing The Work, versus extending someone else’s older lenses. I know these spaces exist, but in academic places, those spaces are sometimes a bit hard to enter.
What advantages or disadvantages are there to including these activities in your teaching/learning/research?
Willa: In building these types of activities into teaching, I think the key is to give students the space to advocate for or act upon what matters to them. The trick is to empower them to see how their voice and their actions can impact others. One thing I’ve done regularly for a while now is have my students write their elected officials. I included this as one of the activities in my book Food Studies：A Hands-On Guide. I’ve been doing this with my intro class, Applied Food Studies, for quite a number of years. I don’t tell the students who to write to or what to advocate for. I let them think about what matters to them, and I am there to help guide them through the process in terms of how you write a formal business letter (a lost skill among Gen Z), how to find your elected officials, to understand which elected officials would be best to address their concerns. For instance, a lot of my students think that reaching out to the top, to the President of the US, is the way to do it. But if it’s about funding for community food banks in their town, I work with them to understand why the mayor or county officials might be more effective. Navigating the political process, NGOs, and community organizations is complicated. Young people don’t necessarily understand or know how to navigate these systems and groups. And some are already jaded in thinking that their voices don’t matter. My students are always surprised when an elected official contacts them back. And that is the coolest thing because I’ve helped them to see that their voices matter and, because they have this specialized training from being in college, they have knowledge that can be used to influence others and make change. They start seeing themselves as members of a community and as citizens rather than as individuals.
Vanessa: I second this. Power mapping and communication with elected officials about food systems issues can be a gateway to further civic engagement.
Willa: But doing this stuff is time consuming and you have to have a certain amount of privilege to be able to do this work, whether time, money, energy, intellectual/emotional well-being, and so on. It takes time to think through activities and to set them up. It also takes people willing to support your efforts. I’m lucky in that my supervisors at work allow me to do these types of things with my students. And you have to be persistent to keep doing it, even if doesn’t seem like your efforts are being seen.
Vanessa: I agree – there are things about my public scholarship and advocacy activities that I did not always disclose to my supervisors and academic peers for fear of being told that was “over stretching myself.” Thus, many times the advocacy activities were the ones that were fulling my desire to conduct research. And as a researcher that is also a practitioner, I love being a connector of resources and knowledge between the different communities I belong to (practitioner, advocate, researcher).
Darcy: Because of the service-learning structure to my courses, the past couple of years I’ve been able to teach hybrid online/face to face classes. Having time built into units to do interviews/site visits/group work provides flexibility that is a huge benefit to service-learning classes. I mention this as we are all questioning/planning for online learning in many forms. The affordances of asynchronous distance learning can be a true gift for advocacy work in the classroom.
One seemingly small, but truly gargantuan learning outcome, has been getting students comfortable with calling people (like farmers, or representatives) on the phone. For many, this is the first time they’ve had to call someone that they don’t yet know. In their reflections on their projects it is almost unanimous: they indicate that a major learning outcome of the class is that they learn sometimes you have to get out from behind a computer to learn something. Meaning, they gain an understanding that oral communication/stories gives them a knowledge base that Google just can’t. Being at Georgia Institute of Technology, I see it as a win when humans get a win over the machines. We obviously need both. But Google only goes so far.
What activism and advocacy were you involved in before the CoVID-19 pandemic (both food and non-food related)? How did you become involved in these activities?
Willa: I’d been involved with several community groups prior to COVID-19. I got involved through reaching out. The organizations did work that I was curious about and I sent an email to say hi. And the organizers were happy to have another set of hands on deck. I think many of us still have a phobia of reaching out due to bad experiences in the past — I think many of us are still secretly afraid of the mean girls in high school keeping us out of the clique. But the organizations I’m involved with have been very friendly and excited to have me on board.
Vanessa: I have served in my statewide food policy council, my local food policy council and the statewide food policy council network. I belonged to local, state and national advocacy organizations around immigrant and POC rights advocacy. If you don’t know how to get involved, just show up or ask to be added to their email list. Opportunities will arise for you to contribute if you have honest intentions. Some of the things that I was working on independently with volunteer undergraduate students was the creation of a list of “international food suppliers” in my town to be utilized by the international student community and the refugee center.
Darcy: A great deal of my activism work has historically been with libraries, prisons, and literacy initiatives and advocacy. I moved to Atlanta three years ago, and prior to that I turned my yard into a garden that mostly went to my food bank. Since being in Atlanta, I’ve worked with the Mayor’s Office of Resiliency, Aglanta (a nonprofit aimed at increasing food security), and done some work on seed saving.
In terms of research/writing, I’m currently finishing up a graphic novel, Found Materials, about issues of access to care in women’s health–specifically endometriosis. It is in the graphic medicine genre which is a genre dedicated to advocacy and activating better care, better access to care, and better understanding of patients’ experiences. There are definite crossovers in this genre with climate writing, and food advocacy writing. Medicine (like food) is a vector where so many important issues about privilege, access, and voice intersect.
Men often find it more difficult than women to discuss sexual health matters, which can result in them becoming angry or upset. online order for viagra It can be ordered easily via a computer, smart buy female viagra phone or other portable device. Conceiving a child (while in itself excruciating) is one of the great joys in a woman’s life. viagra shop usa Dosage should be restricted to that which is similar in action, strength, function, dose, curing process and duration of healing. viagra in australia
In our current circumstances, how does social distancing affect your activism/advocacy? What are ways that people can still become involved in these types of activities with stay-in-place orders?
Willa: Contact your elected officials if you’re in the US or living elsewhere where there are elected officials. Advocate for your community’s needs. I’m in the US and I regularly use 5calls.org. It is an easy way to stay up-to-date on pressing issues and it even gives you the contact information of your federal elected officials to contact per issue.
Food pantries and food banks are suffering badly right now with the increase in food insecurity due to COVID-19. Spread the word of how to access food and community resources – you never know who might be food insecure. If you can, donate. If you’re food insecure yourself and feel comfortable sharing your status, let others know that there’s no shame or stigma in using community resources and let others how to access them.
And call/text/email and check in on your friends and neighbors. While we don’t think of that as activism or advocacy work, being a kind, empathetic community member is the basis of it all.
Vanessa: I second all of that; I feel overwhelmed by all the privileges I have. I have been making weekly donations to local orgs. The current situation has made my commitments to activism stronger and more demanding because the need to organize and highlight this inequality is higher and means life and death for many. You should feel more outrage and saddened by what the pandemic is highlighting – which is inequalities that have always been there. But, also more duty-bound to do work to address them.
Darcy: I agree with everything my colleagues have said here! For me, I’m in a guilt-bind. I have chronic pain and illness that made work pre-COVID-19 really hard. This is the first time since I can remember where my body finally feels like it has been able to rest and recuperate from surgeries (the treatment for endometriosis) in the way I needed. I feel guilty about everything allowing me to stay home right now. I’m trying to reframe this experience as “okay, I do actually have a disability, and my body is TIRED from trying to be fully functional in a world without enough accommodations.” I do need to be super careful because my form of endometriosis is a threat to my lungs, but my daily life has become physically MUCH easier. I have the energy to garden–which I haven’t been able to do in years. And I have more energy for acts of service, reading, and living a fuller life than I was prior to March.
What activism and advocacy have you become involved in (if any) as a result of the CoVID-19 pandemic (both food and non-food related)? How did you become involved in these activities?
Willa: If you follow me on Facebook, I’m constantly posting links about aid and support for restaurant workers and food service employees during this time. They are the community nearest and dearest to my heart as I work at the CIA and I grew up the child of immigrant restaurant workers. I’m lucky in that I’ve managed to socially climb from my humble childhood into a comfortable, job-secure existence. But I constantly think about what things would’ve been like if this pandemic happened when I was a child. My parents worked in Chinese restaurants and we would’ve really suffered — not just because of loss of business, revenue, and tips that all restaurants and restaurant workers are suffering from right now, but possibly also due to racist stigma keeping customers away from eating at a Chinese restaurant. I’ve had quite a few of my former students post about their furloughs and unemployment due to COVID-19. If any of those links make a difference in helping them receive economic aid, that’s great. I’m also writing to my elected officials a lot, as well as donating money to organizations and buying gift cards/takeout from restaurants. And I’m a volunteer with my community’s mutual aid society which is providing hot food deliveries, grocery and prescription pickup, a community help line, and a neighborly chat line for seniors. This mutual aid society sprung up through the efforts of some of my awesome community neighbors. None of these things make me special; I think a lot of us are doing similar things in these times in our own ways.
And I want to be careful not to shame people into doing what I’m doing. Many of my friends, colleagues, and neighbors have so many burdens right now (and they had plenty even before COVID-19). Don’t assume that someone isn’t getting involved because they don’t care or are lazy.
Vanessa: I created an online resource as a way to facilitate communication and resource sharing between food/ag advocates, practitioners, scholars and decision makers. It started as a google document and then becoming an online platform. It was a way to put my skills and knowledge to the service of others in the middle of a crisis and uncertainty. Now we have over 300 daily visitors and 1,000 members. I see the power of just doing something small can help others that might not have access to the resources you do. A few years ago I started an online social media campaign #FoodJusticeFriday so I have been able to connect that campaign to highlight and talk about the pandemic as well.
Darcy: In March, when Georgia started reacting to COVID-19, I called my local farm (Volkstuin Farm in Austell, GA) and asked what, from a digital/ communication/ writing side, they could use for volunteer help. Our first conversation focused on issues of location. For some background: Austell is on the periphery of Atlanta and we’re in an area that is historically underserved for a number of reasons. Originally, the MARTA system (our local transportation system of buses and trains) was designed using urban Apartheid principles to exclude the Westside of Atlanta. So, my early tasks in working with Volkstuin were filling out emergency relief grant applications. Due to some really weird, really old, red tape based on location-perception, it has been hard to get Atlanta-funded relief–even though farms and businesses in comparable distance on the Eastside are automatically seen as “in Atlanta’s space.” So, while I had known about these issues by virtue of experiencing certain restrictions by living here, I did not understand the full pressures that location carries for altruistic people trying to keep the local food system going in our given area.
As I was doing that, and managing my classroom for the rest of the semester, I redesigned my student’s last project. During the semester, I had watched them develop into experts at being student-online-learners. Their final project was to write, produce, and star in their own “ted talks,” where they share best practices for being an online learner. Their audience was other students, via YouTube, who were trying to navigate the online shift. They kicked butt with this assignment! They talked about their own challenges with online learning, and how to overcome them. They talked about the power of community, communication and honesty. I didn’t realize at the time that I had actually given them a “do advocacy assignment” until I watched the videos all together. By virtue of the ted talk genre, they ended their “talks” with powerful calls to action.
This is all to say, keep your eyes open about the good work being done around you at all levels. I didn’t know this assignment was going to give my students the feeling of agency (when they do feel largely powerless), nor did I know the views these videos would amass. I had never done this assignment and didn’t know if it would work or not. It was like everything clicked in this. I think it was a combination of timing (in the world) and a hunger on their end to WANT to activate something good.
You are all at different stages of your careers; what advice do you have for fellow students, postdocs, and faculty members about becoming involved in activism and advocacy?
Willa: There’s a beautiful short essay by Mikki Halpern in Julia Turshen’s Feed the Resistance. It’s called “Practical Activism: If You Want To Do Something, Don’t Try To Do Everything”. I assign it to my students. The idea is that you don’t have to fight for every. single. cause. Pick a few things you’ll really devote your time/money/efforts to and stick to it. But advocacy/activism does require behavioral change, first and foremost. Like any new habit, you have to do it enough until it becomes part of your routine.
I think one thing I’ve learned to do a lot better is to listen. Academics are not always great at listening because we’re taught to be saying something all the time! You learn a lot by listening, especially to those who aren’t always heard. The act of listening to your students, colleagues, and neighbors can expose you to issues and concerns you hadn’t thought of previously.
Vanessa: I always say avoid being a mile wide and inch deep. It is not only shallow and can lead to arrogance, but then I judged your intentions to be an advocate/activist. Ask yourself, are you in academia to be a better activist/advocate when you leave? or are you in academia to have a platform to be an activist/advocate? You should be drawn to activism because of your values, a passion to serve and social justice not for the spotlight.
Darcy: I love Julia Turshen’s book! In past years she was a wonderful skype-guest speaker for my classes! As a postdoc, I’m in a weird, middle-child, academic place. I know there’s an anxiety to find a way to put everything you do on your CV. Do the good, weird, work you care about, and worry about how it will fit into your professional identity later. It always already does fit your identity, even if you’re still working on coherently describing that narrative to someone else.
While important, these activities certainly take up time and energy. How do you care for yourself and maintain balance?
Willa: Knowing when to step away and turn things off. I’m not great at it, but I’m getting better.
Vanessa: I agree – don’t forget to have hobbies or just have fun.
Darcy: I smoosh my dog’s face (#souphound). I’m doing a deep dive into the history of drag. I write snail mail–paper mail is my favorite thing. I am braiding my weeds into a large yard art thing. I play the game SuperBetter on my phone. I’m learning by trial and error in the kitchen with ferments and foraging (be very careful with the margin of error here!). I drink more water than any human has ever drank. Every day I don a “STAY HOME” necklace made by my favorite jewelry maker, and look forward to ceremoniously burying it under the moonlight when all this (waves hands in the common gesture) is over.
Would you like to share any other advice with us?
Vanessa: “The fact that you study something doesn’t mean you want to change it”- Unknown. Ask yourself often how your scholarly activities are actually impacting what you studying/teaching/learning.
Darcy: There’s that meme/saying going around about how we don’t have to go back to normal, we can create something better. That exercise in imagination is fully an exercise in *us* determining the point of a lot of our practices.