Equitable Food Futures: Activating Community Memory, Story, and Imagination in Rural Mississippi

by Carlton Turner, Mina Para Matlon, Erica Kohl-Arenas, and Jean Greene

“…Our work is comprehensive community cultural transformation. That is, the social and economic transformation of our community using arts and agriculture as an intersecting point to engage the community in a conversation about past, present, and future: the building of a collective dream.”

In this book chapter, which is part of the edited volume Trauma Informed Place-making (2024, eds. Cara Courage and Anita McKeown), the authors engage IA’s most recent creative community development project situated in the intersecting fields of arts, community development, and public health. Situated in Utica, a low to moderate income predominantly Black rural community in Mississippi, Equitable Food Futures is framed within the broader context of the creative cultural development practices of the Mississippi Center for Cultural Production (also known as Sipp Culture) and a long standing history of social movements for land-based self-determination and locally owned Black farming in the U.S. South. The book chapter demonstrates how creative methodologies may catalyze historic and new knowledge in ways that inspire a more expansive imagination of healthy, locally owned, and equitable food futures.