Listen Up: Understanding Food Justice and Environmental Justice through Music

Music can be used to understand and communicate about food justice and environmental justice. Communicating through music can strengthen and uplift food and environmental justice practice that is diverse in terms of epistemology, representation, and mode. Music can offer references that may speak to specific and diverse audiences, and opens the door for deeper understandings of inequity and justice in ways that step away from Eurocentric insistence on linear and written communication to teach, exchange knowledge, or debate. This multimedia event brings together four leading and inspiring thinkers, activists, and artists who connect food or environmental justice with music through their work in a panel discussion accompanied by musical samples and audience questions.
As part of the Food Studies’ program’s “Critical Food Studies and Social Justice” series and the Tishman Environment and Design Center’s Earth Week activities, “Listen Up!” centered ideas of decolonization, decolonization, and that music is not simply a commodity to be consumed, but rather, essential and powerful to many communities and peoples’ understanding and communicating about the world, surviving injustices, and as a guiding light. The event was moderated by Dr. Kristin Reynolds, Chair of Food Studies, and Mike Harrington, Assistant Director at the Tishman Environment and Design Center.
Panelists:
•Lyla June, Indigenous musician, scholar and community organizer
•Bryant Terry, James Beard & NAACP Image Award-winning chef, educator, and author
•Dr. Thomas RaShad Easley, certified diversity, equity and inclusion consultant, musical artist, educator, and Founder and CEO of Mind Heart for Diversity, LLC
•Dr. Tanya Kalmonovitch, musician, scholar, author, and Associate Professor of Music Entrepreneurship at The New School