Ways of Knowing

Honouring all relations that sustain life

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Earth

Food sovereignty challenges the corporate food regime

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Justice

Fighting all systemic inequities

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Tables

Promoting decolonization and reconciliation

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Conversations

An enticing menu of videos and photo essays on food themes

We are gathered around a table with Mayan collaborators Ángel and Valiana in a thatched roof cottage by the gulf coast of the Yucatan, their ancestral home. A sea snail on the table offers an entry point to the kind of conversations we hope this multimedia package will generate.

We have organized the videos and photo essays around the interrelated themes of the Earth to Tables Legacies project. These four themes coincide with the four dynamic tensions that frame the project. There is a linear logic from earth to tables, conventionally following the processes of production, distribution, consumption. The sea snail spiral offers a more organic way of thinking about the food and relationships.

  1. The underlying Ways of Knowing emerge from the tensions between Eurocentric knowledges and Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and acting.
  2. These ways of knowing are grounded in the Earth as a living organism as promoted by food sovereignty movements challenging the corporate food regime.
  3. Food sovereignty promotes social and environmental Justice or equity for intersectional identities rather than hierarchical relations of power.
  4. The Table represents the political struggle between neoliberal capitalism, colonization and globalization, and a decolonization and reconciliation process.

We introduce the themes here as one way to organize and work with the videos and photo essays in a class or a community-based workshop. A facilitator can choose to enter the material through any one of these four themes. While there is a linear logic to the order, one can begin anywhere, mixing and matching the visual stories.

Below we link the themes to dynamic tensions elaborated in the Setting the Table section and ground them in the Legacies exchange with selected quotes from our collaborators. Listen for these excerpts in the forthcoming videos and photo essays, to understand them in their specific contexts.