Lauda Wellness Lecture 2024
Event: Donald P. Lauda Wellness Lecture 2024 on [Re]turn to the Community: Food Insecurity and a Critical Re-envisioning of Asset-Based Public Health Approaches
Date: Tuesday, March 26, 2024
Time: 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM
Location: TBD
Black communities are disproportionately impacted by food insecurity and food access disparities, a crisis exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. To date, prevailing public health solutions addressing food-related inequities often focus on downstream, individual-level interventions, (e.g., food donation or assistance programs), and do not meaningfully interrogate broader structures and root-causes (e.g., prohibitive food and agricultural policies, legacies of cultural erasure). Missing from public health discourse is a more direct engagement with how food insecurity disparities begin at higher levels of food production and the unique social assets and collective voice of a community or population, such as their capacity to grow and distribute their own food and address structural inequities.
In this talk, Dr. Andrew Carter, professor at San Jose State University, will share some of my key findings and ethnographic reflections from his upcoming book project Seeds of Sovereignty. Dr. Carter's research traces the historical legacies of African, Caribbean, and Black (ACB) women farmers and their unique capacities to support community food security and restore frayed cultural foodways. Project findings offer new ways to think about asset-based public health campaigns and food security interventions. The presentation will be of interest to students, researchers, community-based organizers, and applied practitioners and professionals with a stake in advancing social justice principles in public health, agriculture, and beyond.
Speaker Bio: Dr. Carter is an assistant professor in the Department of Public Health and Recreation at San Jose State University. His research interests include health disparities, food systems, community-based participatory research, and intercultural communication. A primary feature of his work explores how Black farmers challenge norms, power inequities, and structural barriers in the agriculture industry to preserve their cultural legacies and use farming as a vehicle to address broader social, public health, and economic disparities across the Black diaspora. He has published work in disciplinary diverse academic journals such as Health Communication, Communication Theory, Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise, and Health, Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, and Critical Public Health.
