A recipe for a scientist is a how-to guide; when engaged with humanities, that recipe is a poem, a declaration, a history, a linguistics manual. A seed for a farmer is a starting point; and when situated within cultural knowledge and political lives, seeds become sacred ancestors and active protesters.

Food & Memory, hosted by Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck, the third and final conference of Rethinking Place, and aims to explore food systems, agricultural practices, and culinary histories as a point of entry into place-making past, present, and future.

The past two Rethinking Place conferences have engaged with themes that apply to our complex food systems and their many human and non-human players – recipes and seeds can be seen as living archives, sites of research, and modes of knowledge production. Continuing with the vein of place-based understandings put forward by the 2022-2023 Fisher Center for the Performing Arts and Center for Human Rights and the Arts COMMON GROUND biennial, the Environmental and Urban Studies classes and programming, the Bard Farm, and existing partners, Rethinking Place hosts a multidisciplinary gathering to interrogate questions of food and memory. 

The conference brings together agricultural workers, chefs, food systems scholars, and artists to create fertile ground for interdisciplinary discussion. Situated on the banks of the Mahicantuck (Hudson River) in a time when current food systems, planetary health, and direct violence pose existential threats to the sovereignty and wellbeing of many, Rethinking Place aims to center a diverse range of voices and histories that have touched and formed the current agricultural region of the Hudson Valley and beyond.

Free registration available on Eventbrite via the link below. Please note that each day requires separate registration.

Lucille Grignon

My name is Lucy Grignon. I am an enrolled member of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Nation and a direct descendant of the Menominee Nation. Muh-he-con-ne-ok being of the People of the Waters that are never still, and Menominee being of the Ancient movers. I am a passionate community-taught chef, educator, teacher, Momma, photographer, artist, writer, doula, and advocate for my community and the world around me. I am developing my relationship with Grandmother Earth. My family owns an Indigenous Homestead called Ancient Roots in Bowler, Wisconsin. We research traditional gardening practices from our ancestors dating back to ages ago to the present day. We use a combination of their methods to learn, preserve, grow, seed save, reconnect, and share. We are working to reconnect to our cultural inheritance through the land, plants, medicines, and wildlife. I recognize my connections to my Indigenous roots come in many forms, from our language journey to the stories of our elders, our people, and our healing.

Vivien Sansour

Vivien Sansour is an artist, researcher, and writer. She uses installations, images, sketches, film, soil, seeds, and plants to enliven old cultural tales in contemporary presentations and to advocate for seed conservation and the protection of agrobiodiversity as a cultural/political act. Vivien founded the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library in 2014, where she works with farmers in Palestine and around the world to preserve ancestral seeds and biocultural knowledge. Her work as an artist, scholar, and writer has been showcased internationally. Vivien was most recently the Distinguished Artistic Fellow in Experimental Humanities at Bard College, and is currently the Executive Director of the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library.

Jalal Sabur

In 2010, Jalal Sabur began farming with Wassaic Community Farm – growing produce for farmers markets while running a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program and gleaning project. While at Wassaic Community Farm Jalal co-founded the Freedom Food Alliance and the Victory Bus Project. The Freedom Food Alliance is a collective of small rural and urban farmers, activists, artists, community folks and political prisoners who use food as an organizing tool. The Alliance founded the Victory Bus Project to connect urban and rural communities and to support families of prisoners by providing transportation (along with a box of farm-fresh food) for folks visiting prisoners in the Hudson Valley. In 2013, Jalal started Sweet Freedom Farm to grow and aggregate vegetables, grains, herbs, and maple syrup, prioritizing the folks impacted by the prison system. Sweet Freedom is also a training site for young Black farmers, a gathering space for partnering projects in the alliance, and building a Grow Food, Not Prison movement.

Kenny Perkins

Kenny Perkins is the Project Manager at Akwesasne Seed Hub, an organization that “ASH LLC seeks to empower our Mohawk and wider Haudenosaunee communities to practice embodied self-determination through the reclamation of our traditional foodways and language. Focusing on scaling up traditional food and seeds to make them more widely available to our Mohawk community and engaging in strong language immersion and intergenerational mentorship ensures that we are making traditional healthy foods and seeds and the skills needed to cultivate them in our daily lives more widely available to the community. This allows for growing the next generation of land, food, and seed stewards who are fluent in our language and have a strong cultural cosmovision to birth a chapter of sustainable health for lands, people, and all our relations, which culminates in the dignified resurgence of a healthy, resilient and sovereign Mohawk Nation.”

BEM Bookstore,  a new literary home at the intersection of food & Blackness. https://www.bembrooklyn.com/ 

Tatiana Blackhorse

Tatiana is a first semester senior at Bard College studying Psychology. She is half Navajo and half Hungarian and dedicated this research to learning more about her Indigenous ancestry. Her interest in learning more about how food is related to cultural identity and the well being of the Navajo people, comes from her own personal experiences with seeing how the lack of food security has impacted the food choices of her relatives. There is an importance in doing more research for Indigenous communities and she believes that food connects you to your culture. She hopes to continue building more on her research, but is extremely grateful for her first research experience. 

Project Abstract: How Proper Food Choices of the Navajo People Has Been Disrupted by The Lack of Traditional Food Practices and Sovereignty

 Indigenous research in general uses a very western perspective when it comes to evaluating the issues, cultural practices, and history of Indigenous peoples. Located in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, the Navajo Nation is the largest reservation located in the United States. Home to over 250,000 inhabitants, the people, history, language, culture, and food practices are to this day, extremely under researched. Any research that does exist, it is very limited or skewed to a western narrative. Colonization is the enemy to all Indigenous cultures, and it has impacted the Navajo in great lengths. With high obesity, cancer, and diabete rates, there is a lack of resources to support those who live on the reservations. Not only that, there are many mental health struggles that the Navajo endure such as depression, suicide, substance abuse, etc. Implementing traditional food practices has been getting less frequent and common for the Navajo people. The reservation is a food desert and many native people struggle with the impacts of colonization. The lack of food sovereignty and security has led to food choices that have created many health issues for the Navajo people. Reviewing works from Kyle Whyte, Vandana Shiva, traditional Navajo cook books, historical reports, and more, there is a lot of evidence suggesting that food sovereignty and the maintenance of traditional food practices is extremely important for the health of Indigenous communities, focusing on the Navajo people. This is a literature review focused on demonstrating the importance of how traditional food ways are for the Navajo people and how colonization is the main contributing factor for Native people to lose touch with their traditional practices.

Frances Cathryn

Frances Cathryn combines archival research, media theory, and social design to recontextualize American cultural narratives. Her cultural criticism on topics ranging from the myth of American exceptionalism to marginalized historical landscapes has been featured in such publications as Frieze, the Los Angeles Review of Books, ARTnews, the Brooklyn Rail, and Social Text journal. She currently manages editorial projects at Forge Project, where she coordinates publications, advises writers-in-residence, authors a monthly newsletter, and leads its digital-first journal, Forging.

Land and Memory: Research protocols and investigations in colonial archives: This 1-hour presentation will cover two perspectives on a research project formed between Forge Project, a Native-led arts organization, and Bard College Rethinking Place initiative. The collaboration between the arts space and academic institution hopes to uncover the history of the land in the surrounding region over time. This presentation will try to answer the question of the role and use of colonial archives in decolonial contexts. Using as its starting point the moment of full displacement of the Moh-He-Con-Nuck from their homelands (and partnering with the Stockbridge Munsee Community Cultural Affairs department to share these histories), Frances Cathryn and Lucas Ondak are working to produce a land “narrative” that will answer the question of the origin of New Forge Road where Forge Project is situated.

Recommended Resources:

Barbara P. Rielly Memorial Library at the CCHS Museum & Library https://cchsny.org/explore/research-archive/

Hudson Area Library https://historyroom.hudsonarealibrary.org/

Town of Taghkanic https://www.taghkanic.org/history-map 

Misty Cook

Misty Cook (Davids), M.S., is the author of Medicine Generations, Natural Native American Medicines Traditional to the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohicans Tribe. Cook studied these medicines for over seven years to complete this book, enjoying every minute of it. This includes searching for them, identification, gathering, drying, preservation for use throughout the year, preparation and having them available for those who need them. She is also a cultural consultant with a masters in management providing diversity training on many topics including Native American students in education, Native American history, Native American games, and of course, Medicines.

Medicine Walk: We will talk about the history of the Medicines growing on the homelands of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohicans Tribe.

Recommended Resources:

Medicine Generations: Natural Native American Medicines Traditional to the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohicans Tribe, by Misty Cook

Choy Commons

Choy Commons is a nonhierarchical cooperative of Asian-led farms engaging our communities in building food sovereignty for the Northeast. Learn more at https://www.choycommons.org/. 

Growing interdependence – building a food sovereignty cooperative within and against industrial food systems with Choy Commons: The many hypocrisies of the American food system can be explained through the histories of pan-Asian American foodways – anti-Japanese xenophobia began with a “biological yellow peril” in the rising popularity of Japanese botanicals pre-WWII, and today, despite botanical sciences disproving these fears, the language of this fear remains, all while rising popularity of pan-Asian foodways rises in high brow and everyday cuisines of modern Americans. 

In direct contradiction to today’s food systems, Choy Commons, a “nonhierarchical cooperative of Asian-led farms engaging our communities in building food sovereignty for the Northeast,” works to build community and capacity for Asian American farms and farmers through resource sharing, cultural events, relationship building, and the growth of mutual aid networks. 

Lucille Grignon

My name is Lucy Grignon. I am an enrolled member of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Nation and a direct descendant of the Menominee Nation. Muh-he-con-ne-ok being of the People of the Waters that are never still, and Menominee being of the Ancient movers. I am a passionate community-taught chef, educator, teacher, Momma, photographer, artist, writer, doula, and advocate for my community and the world around me. I am developing my relationship with Grandmother Earth. My family owns an Indigenous Homestead called Ancient Roots in Bowler, Wisconsin. We research traditional gardening practices from our ancestors dating back to ages ago to the present day. We use a combination of their methods to learn, preserve, grow, seed save, reconnect, and share. We are working to reconnect to our cultural inheritance through the land, plants, medicines, and wildlife. I recognize my connections to my Indigenous roots come in many forms, from our language journey to the stories of our elders, our people, and our healing.

In the Kitchen with Our Ancestors– Electa Wuhwehweeheemeew Quinney Keynote with Lucy Grignon from Ancient Roots: Join Lucy Grignon from Ancient Roots Homestead as we tap into The Ancestral Knowledge that exists within each one of us. 

Nathan Kleinman

Building land based solidarity networks: Environmental humanities theorists are creating new vocabularies for organizing in modes inspired by the more than human world – a few that come to mind are biomimicry, or learning from nature to solve human problems, regenerative design, designing systems that work with nature, social permaculture, and relationship-focused social design, among others. 

In this panel conversation with Nathan Kleinman, Tara Rodriguez Besosa, and Lana Mustafa, we will discuss networks of resource and knowledge sharing in various fields of land based work – plant breeding and seed sharing, community kitchens and models of local food access, and importantly, community building around cultural resilience projects and decolonial movements.

Stephanie Lee

Stephanie Kyuyoung Lee is the director of the Office of Human Resources, a critical design studio that explores the intersection of spatial, racial, and material politics as a liberatory practice. Her current project builds a comparative genealogy of radical ruralism, from early abolitionist communes to social justice-based farms throughout New York. As the Strauch Early Career Fellow at Cornell University, Lee’s teaching and research focus on utopian agrarian projects, botanical histories, and rural commons as topics of design-research. Previously, she was awarded the inaugural Architecture Fellowship at Bard College and the 2020 Fellow for the Future Architecture Platform. She participated in residencies including the Arts Center Residency supported by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the Architecture Residency at Art Omi. She has exhibited her work at Haus der Architektur in Graz, Austria, and citygroup gallery in New York City. Her writings and interviews have been published in Koozarch, The Funambulist, PLAT, and Archifutures (dpr-barcelona, 2020). Stephanie received her Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology and Studio Art at Wesleyan University and holds a Master of Architecture from Rice University.

Hard Labor, Soft Space: The Making of Radical Farms

This project examines the rural future in the context of climate disasters and political upheavals by exploring the intersections of race, labor, and land in agriculture-based collective living projects, particularly in the Northeastern United States. New York’s history of settler colonialism, beginning in 1545 with Giovanni Verrazano’s encounter with the Lenape, set the stage for centuries of agricultural extraction and human trafficking of BIPOC farm workers. In today’s post-pandemic Northeast, a growing romanticization of rural living intersects with anti-gentrification movements in places like Kingston and Hudson, NY.

“Hard Labor, Soft Space” is a research-based design investigation into the current rise of collective farms and radical food systems in the Hudson Valley, reframing rurality as a site of radical reclamation. This project engages with collective intelligence and alternative land stewardship models, challenging traditional notions of intelligence that reproduce colonial, racist, and capitalist frameworks. It critiques the racialized history of land ownership and explores how human informal wisdom, community knowledge, and collective intelligence shape sustainable agricultural practices.

The project traces a genealogy of agrarian-based abolitionist communities, from 19th-century efforts like Nashoba and Timbuctoo to contemporary BIPOC-led initiatives such as Sweet Freedom Farm, Choy Commons, and Soulfire Farm. Through archival research, interviews, and counter-mapping, it develops frameworks for collective living based on racial justice and sustainable agriculture. By recognizing rural commons and collective wisdom as forms of intelligence, this project challenges the dominant, exploitative models of industrial farming that extract labor and capital.

The findings will offer practical strategies for building resilient agricultural communities that resist systems of exploitation, while developing infrastructure of care within a capitalist landscape. Ultimately, the project aims to provide a blueprint for transforming rural spaces into sites of collective resistance, radical reclamation, and intelligence rooted in racial justice and sustainable land stewardship.

Sage Liotta

Bio: Sage Liotta is a 2024 Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow for Rethinking Place.

Project Abstract: Listen to the Trees: Narrative and Performance at Montgomery Place

The project is about stories, trees, and memory. It’s about reimagining how history can be told and where it can be found. It’s about learning how to be a good stranger, build a relationship with place, and live with an awareness of a difficult past and potential future. This work takes two forms: first, a research paper that investigates Montgomery Place’s Arboretum. Here, the visual culture foregrounds the story of New York’s Livingston Family — situating a colonial narrative as the dominant perspective. Within the Arboretum, that colonial narrative is maintained by the Manor house, but is contrasted by the presence of the Black Locust, Sycamore, White Pine, and Osage Orange Trees. In their performances of scent, sound, taste, and texture, these trees gesture to the alternate history of the landscape. By connecting the sensorium of these trees to sources of Mohican tree relations, Settler tree relations, and histories of violence and dispossession, the non-colonial history of the landscape is rendered present and ongoing — gestured to and held by the trees, as the Livingston history is represented by the Manor house. Drawing upon the work of scholars Diana Taylor and Linda Tuhiwa Smith, I gather these multifaceted stories of being from Montgomery Place into a single Landed Ecology that aims to reimagine the narrative of Montgomery Place’s past, and expand the possibilities for its future.

The second form is that of an audio piece that tells my experience of working on this project — giving sound to the story within the story. This piece is a reflection of personal process, and an audible inclusion of my own narrative into the collective whole of Montgomery Place.

Farah Momen

Farah Momen (she/her) is an entrepreneur and chef exploring the ways in which food experiences can be a healing, reflective, connective tool for individuals from all walks of life.

She is the co-founder of The Now Exchange, an NGO that fosters health access and choice in the Bangladeshi garment sector. Farah is a native of New York State, currently residing in Massachusetts with her husband Matthew and kitten Ellie Roosevelt. She was a Season 1 cast member of Top Chef Amateurs on Bravo TV paired with mentor Chef Melissa King.

Lana Mustafa

Lana is a Palestinian-American farmer, seed protector, beekeeper, and Executive Director of Montclair Community Farms. She is also the founder of Roots of Resilience, a Mutual Aid initiative supporting farmers in the West Bank. Lana, a mother of three, was born in New Jersey and spent her childhood and adolescence between the U.S. and Mukhmas, a farming village in the West Bank where her family has lived for many generations. 

With an immense love for nature and deep roots in Palestinian farmland, Lana is passionately dedicated to advocating for food sovereignty and to nurturing sustainable agriculture here and abroad. 

Building land based solidarity networks: Environmental humanities theorists are creating new vocabularies for organizing in modes inspired by the more than human world – a few that come to mind are biomimicry, or learning from nature to solve human problems, regenerative design, designing systems that work with nature, social permaculture, and relationship-focused social design, among others. 

In this panel conversation with Nathan Kleinman, Tara Rodriguez Besosa, and Lana Mustafa, we will discuss networks of resource and knowledge sharing in various fields of land based work – plant breeding and seed sharing, community kitchens and models of local food access, and importantly, community building around cultural resilience projects and decolonial movements.

Experimental Humanities

Record your thoughts about this political moment and become a part of Bard history in the Experimental Humanities Portable Sound Booth. The booth, designed, built, and managed by Bard students and faculty, is timed to coincide with the 2024 election and its aftermath. For the Food & Memory conference we are especially interested in exploring ways this election cycle intersects with the cultural politics of food and memory. Interviews or self-recordings will be archived and remain anonymous. All are welcome.

Luis Chávez-González (Caxcan/Tepehuan)

Dr. Luis Chávez-González is an interdisciplinary musician and scholar whose research bridges music and sound with narrative performance by focusing on the expression of danza, fiesta, and Indigenous self-determination in the Americas. Other research interests include Indigenous research methodologies and ways of knowing, Nahua history and culture, and Native language revitalization (Nahuatl). Professor Chávez-González’s articles have appeared in Ethnomusicology Review and Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education.

Workshop: Maize in the Milpas: Nixtamalized Corn Masa and Cuisine in the Americas. Saturday at 11:30am in the Bard Stevenson Library.

Vivien Sansour

Vivien Sansour is an artist, researcher, and writer. She uses installations, images, sketches, film, soil, seeds, and plants to enliven old cultural tales in contemporary presentations and to advocate for seed conservation and the protection of agrobiodiversity as a cultural/political act. Vivien founded the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library in 2014, where she works with farmers in Palestine and around the world to preserve ancestral seeds and biocultural knowledge. Her work as an artist, scholar, and writer has been showcased internationally. Vivien was most recently the Distinguished Artistic Fellow in Experimental Humanities at Bard College, and is currently the Executive Director of the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library.

The Traveling Kitchen is an extension of the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library. Designed as an interactive social engagement art and education project, The kitchen engages a larger audience in the conversation about bio-cultural heritage, agrobiodiversity, and the process of coevolution that takes place through human activities in the field and in the kitchen.

Lucas Ondak

Lucas Ondak is a transexual curator and artist from Edmond, Oklahoma, the occupied land of the Comanche, Kickapoo, Kiowa, Osage, and Wichita people. They are committed to working with contemporary art and artists who consider the lives and experiences of the prairie region, particularly work that centers on decolonization and queer liberation. He is a recent graduate from the Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies on the sacred homelands of the Munsee and Muhheaconneok people where they researched queer art history, contemporary Indigenous art, and 20th and 21st century photography.

Land and Memory: Research protocols and investigations in colonial archives: This 1-hour presentation will cover two perspectives on a research project formed between Forge Project, a Native-led arts organization, and Bard College Rethinking Place initiative. The collaboration between the arts space and academic institution hopes to uncover the history of the land in the surrounding region over time. This presentation will try to answer the question of the role and use of colonial archives in decolonial contexts. Using as its starting point the moment of full displacement of the Moh-He-Con-Nuck from their homelands (and partnering with the Stockbridge Munsee Community Cultural Affairs department to share these histories), Frances Cathryn and Lucas Ondak are working to produce a land “narrative” that will answer the question of the origin of New Forge Road where Forge Project is situated.

Justin Paulino

Justin Paulino (he/him) is the undergraduate research assistant and recipient of the 2023 research fellowship for Rethinking Place. Justin is a senior joint major in Sociology and American Indigenous Studies concentrating in Latin American Studies. Residing in the Bronx, he is inspired by the intersections of Black + Indigenous studies, urban ecologies, sensorium studies and decolonial praxis. Justin is a recipient of the 2024-2025 Jane Emily Lytle and Almon W. Lytle II Senior Project Research Award, which supports students whose senior projects address themes in the areas of Environmental and Urban Studies. His senior thesis will examine the relationship between residents and privatized universities in New York City. 

Rethinking the Bard Narrative: Public Writing, Zines and Place-Based Research: Zines are sites of communal archiving, re-narrativization, and radical reimaginings for our future. This workshop, led by student research assistants Justin Paulino ‘25 and Leila Stallone ‘24 will explore the journey of creating the Rethinking Place Zine Project. Entitled Rethinking the Bard Narrative, the workshop will briefly cover the three zines created within this two-year project. Utilizing Black and Indigenous frameworks and archival research, the zine project is an attempt to make historically excluded narratives more visible. The locations of the zine include Bard “landmarks” such as Cruger Island, Montgomery Place and Blithewood.  

In this hour, participants will learn approaches to public writing, the nuance of archival research (digital and physical), and how to centralize land relations within one’s work. Rethinking the Bard Narrative is a localized project that can expand place-based research amongst the Hudson Valley community and beyond. 

Kenny Perkins

Kenny Perkins is the Project Manager at Akwesasne Seed Hub, an organization that “ASH LLC seeks to empower our Mohawk and wider Haudenosaunee communities to practice embodied self-determination through the reclamation of our traditional foodways and language. Focusing on scaling up traditional food and seeds to make them more widely available to our Mohawk community and engaging in strong language immersion and intergenerational mentorship ensures that we are making traditional healthy foods and seeds and the skills needed to cultivate them in our daily lives more widely available to the community. This allows for growing the next generation of land, food, and seed stewards who are fluent in our language and have a strong cultural cosmovision to birth a chapter of sustainable health for lands, people, and all our relations, which culminates in the dignified resurgence of a healthy, resilient and sovereign Mohawk Nation.”

Tara Rodriguez-Besosa

Tara Rodríguez Besosa (they/them/elle) is an interdisciplinary designer and organizer who collaborates with plants, food, ecological processes, farmers, cooks and culture. Coming from Borikén with their companion dog Pulpa, they currently live in the Hudson Valley while completing an MA in Human Rights and the Arts at Bard. Tara’s interests center around the non-human, rights of nature, site specific food sovereignty, the Caribbean, and QTBIPOC liberation. Tara is co-founder and creative director of the collective El Departamento de la Comida (@eldepartamentodelafood) and co-founder/resident of OtraCosa Jaragüal Cuir (queer land project in Borikén). 

Building land based solidarity networks: Environmental humanities theorists are creating new vocabularies for organizing in modes inspired by the more than human world – a few that come to mind are biomimicry, or learning from nature to solve human problems, regenerative design, designing systems that work with nature, social permaculture, and relationship-focused social design, among others. 

In this panel conversation with Nathan Kleinman, Tara Rodriguez Besosa, and Lana Mustafa, we will discuss networks of resource and knowledge sharing in various fields of land based work – plant breeding and seed sharing, community kitchens and models of local food access, and importantly, community building around cultural resilience projects and decolonial movements.

Jalal Sabur

In 2010, Jalal began farming with Wassaic Community Farm – growing produce for farmers markets while running a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program and gleaning project. While at Wassaic Community Farm Jalal co-founded the Freedom Food Alliance and the Victory Bus Project. The Freedom Food Alliance is a collective of small rural and urban farmers, activists, artists, community folks and political prisoners who use food as an organizing tool. The Alliance founded the Victory Bus Project to connect urban and rural communities and to support families of prisoners by providing transportation (along with a box of farm-fresh food) for folks visiting prisoners in the Hudson Valley. In 2013, Jalal started Sweet Freedom Farm to grow and aggregate vegetables, grains, herbs, and maple syrup, prioritizing the folks impacted by the prison system. Sweet Freedom is also a training site for young Black farmers, a gathering space for partnering projects in the alliance, and building a Grow Food, Not Prison movement.

Grow Food Not Prisons: Building a movement towards Liberation and Justice: This workshop delves into the critical intersection of black land sovereignty and prison abolition, exploring how systemic injustices perpetuate cycles of oppression within black communities. Participants will examine the historical roots of land dispossession and its connection to mass incarceration, and explore strategies for reclaiming land and dismantling the prison-industrial complex. Through interactive discussions and collaborative activities, attendees will gain a deeper understanding of the intertwined struggles for land rights and abolitionist movements, and envision pathways towards collective liberation and justice. Join us in exploring how centering black land sovereignty is essential for realizing the vision of a world without prisons.

Recommended Resource: 

Report: Bringing the movement for food justice inside prisons and jails, https://impactjustice.org/innovation/food-in-prison/#report 

Ozoz Sokoh

Ozoz Sokoh is a Nigerian food writer, explorer, and educator whose work celebrates the wealth of Nigerian cuisine and its global connections. A former exploration geologist, she believes that food is more than eating – it is history, culture, identity and more. Her debut cookbook, Chop Chop: Cooking the food of Nigeria is out on the 18th of March.

Her research and documentation focus on reclaiming and reimagining foodways, celebrating the joy of eating and tracing the roots of  Nigerian and West African cuisine across the Black Atlantic. She explores the intellectual contributions of West Africa to global food culture and, through Coast to Coast, maps edible links in food, drink, utensils, and culinary practices.

Ozoz is a professor of Food and Tourism Studies at Centennial College in Ontario and makes her home with her three teenage children (also enthusiastic eaters and cooks) in Mississauga, part of the Treaty Lands and Territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation.

Leila Stallone

Leila recently graduated from Bard College in 2024 with a degree in Anthropology and Environmental Studies. In 2023, they joined Rethinking Place as an Engagement and Education Undergrad Fellow. Through their fellowship and collaboration with the Research Fellow, they started a place-based research project, facilitated workshops, and helped maintain the Bard Farm Natural Dye Garden. In 2024, Leila submitted their Senior Project titled: “Farm Against This Mad World: An Ethnographic Glimpse into an Alternative BIPOC-Centered Farm Community in New York” which explored how the action of small-scale farming can be an action of community building and an act of resistance against capitalist agricultural systems. This past summer, they were selected to be an Anne Saxelby Legacy Fund Apprentice and spent a month at Winona LaDuke’s Hemp and Heritage Farm on the White Earth Reservation. Leila continues to think about the relationship of land and living histories as they continue to study food systems and through research at the Minnesota Historical Society where they are helping to create a Queer Digital History Map.

Rethinking the Bard Narrative: Public Writing, Zines and Place-Based Research: Zines are sites of communal archiving, re-narrativization, and radical reimaginings for our future. This workshop, led by student research assistants Justin Paulino ‘25 and Leila Stallone ‘24 will explore the journey of creating the Rethinking Place Zine Project. Entitled Rethinking the Bard Narrative, the workshop will briefly cover the three zines created within this two-year project. Utilizing Black and Indigenous frameworks and archival research, the zine project is an attempt to make historically excluded narratives more visible. The locations of the zine include Bard “landmarks” such as Cruger Island, Montgomery Place and Blithewood.  

In this hour, participants will learn approaches to public writing, the nuance of archival research (digital and physical), and how to centralize land relations within one’s work. Rethinking the Bard Narrative is a localized project that can expand place-based research amongst the Hudson Valley community and beyond. 

Maggie Thomas

Bio: Maggie Thomas is a 2024 Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow for Rethinking Place.

Project Abstract: A small garden plot at a harm reduction organization on the outskirts of the city, a fenced in tennis court of raised beds in the center of a catholic compound below an inpatient detox unit, a shed full of potting soil in a field in the cold in the spring : these are spaces of recovery from substance use disorder and addiction where work is being done. How does changing our relationship to place through work affect our recoveries? Using interviews and case studies, I explore and catalog the particular benefits of what I call external work in recovery which include endurance, a new relationship to time and punishment, integration in community, and self-reliance. 

Marie Watt

Marie Watt is an American artist. She is a member of the Seneca Nation of Indians (Turtle Clan) and also has German-Scot ancestry. Her interdisciplinary work draws from history, biography, Haudenosaunee protofeminism, and Indigenous teachings; in it, she explores the intersection of history, community, and storytelling. Through collaborative actions, she instigates multigenerational and cross-disciplinary conversations that might create a lens and conversation for understanding connectedness to place, one another, and the universe.

Olson, Sara Calvosa (Karuk), Chími Nu’am: Native California Foodways for the Contemporary Kitchen

Bitsoie, Freddie (Navajo) & James O. Fraioli, New Native Kitchen: Celebrating Modern Recipes of the American Indian

Weso, Thomas Peore (Menominee tribe), Good Seeds: A Menominee Indian Food Memoir

Webster, Rebecca M. (Oneida), Our Precious Corn: Yukwanénste

Oden, Loretta Barrett (Potawatomi tribe), Corn Dance: Inspired First American Cuisine

Pesantubbee, Michelene E. (Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma) & Michael J. Zogry (editors), Native Foodways: Indigenous North American Religious Traditions and Foods

All texts are available at the Bard Stevenson Library.

TRAIN: Bard College is a 15 minute drive from the Rhinecliff Amtrak Station.

TAXI:

• HVA Taxi Service, 845-867-8257
• Red Hook/Rhinebeck Taxi, 845-876-2010
• Around the Corner Taxi, 845-224-4760

Accessible on Bard Shuttle:

Hotel Tivoli, Tivoli

The Grand Dutchess Inn, Red Hook

Red Hook Country Inn, Red Hook

Within a 15-20 minute drive:

Beekman Arms & Delamater Inn, Rhinebeck

Courtyard by Marriott, Kingston

Hotel Kinsley, Kingston

 

Find Olin Auditorium:

Find Finberg House:

Find the Stevenson Library: