public scholarship and community engagement in building community food security: the case of the...

Public Scholarship and Community Engagement inBuilding Community Food Security: The Case of theUniversity of Kentucky*ruso_29 560..583

Keiko TanakaDepartment of SociologyUniversity of Kentucky

Patrick H. MooneyDepartment of SociologyUniversity of Kentucky

Abstract The current call for public scholarship and community engage-ment by universities and disciplinary organizations has created opportunitiesto develop innovative ways to integrate research, instruction, and outreach.This article discusses a collaboration among scholars at the University ofKentucky and alternative agrifood movement organizations that has evolvedas they pursue an alternative agrifood system in Kentucky. This collaborationmade instructional programs in sociology and the honors world food issuestrack places in which both students and instructors can examine “problems”of the conventional agrifood system, conduct research, and develop collabo-rative relationships with community activists. We draw on Burawoy’s discus-sion of public sociology and its interface with professional, critical, and policysociologies. Supplementing our discussion with literature from social move-ments and science studies, we demonstrate how this integrated approach canrender sociological knowledge and skills useful as critical support of alterna-tive agrifood movements. We argue that the “experiential classroom” is anexcellent site for the critical examination within the agrifood movements ofoppositional culture. This, in turn, makes possible students’ recognition ofinjustice in the existing agrifood system.

Introduction

Although food is a concern for everyone, food is also mysterious to many.Recent popular books on food politics (e.g., Kingsolver 2007; Pollan2006; Schlosser 2002) may have helped decipher the mystery andencourage support for alternative food systems, for example, purchasing

* This research was supported with a grant from the University of Kentucky College ofAgriculture. We would like to thank our students in SOC350: Food Security (Fall 2004),SOC517: Rural Sociology (Fall 2006, Fall 2008), and HON115: World Food Issues II (Spring2007) for making this work possible. We also thank Deborah Webb and Shana Herronfrom the Kentucky Community Farm Alliance who inspired us to develop and continue thiswork. Christopher Blackden provided valuable GIS support to the project. The paperbenefitted greatly from the thoughtful comments and criticisms of anonymous reviewers aswell as the guest editors of this issue: William Friedland, Elizabeth Ransom, and StevenWolf.

Rural Sociology 75(4), 2010, pp. 560–583DOI: 10.1111/j.1549-0831.2010.00029.xCopyright © 2010, by the Rural Sociological Society

of food at local farmers’ markets, subscribing to a share of a communitysupported agriculture (CSA) organization, or growing organic veg-etables in their backyard. Yet as our students and our colleagues oftenattest, many continue to feel their understanding about food, particu-larly about how food systems operate, is inadequate. This sense of inad-equacy in regard to food knowledge (knowledge about food fromproduction processes and nutritional properties to cooking methodsand sociocultural meanings) discourages many people, including thosewho regularly shop at farmers’ markets, from identifying as participantsin alternative agrifood movements (AAMs). We argue that the AAMshave a weakly developed oppositional consciousness (Mansbridge2001a:1) and that, through an integrated research, teaching, andoutreach program, scholars can contribute “useful critical support”(Friedland 2008) to the elaboration, extension, and maturation of suchconsciousness.

Adapting Mansbridge (2001a, 2001b), the development of opposi-tional consciousness in the AAMs would entail identification of the foodsystem as a source of injustice; opposition to that injustice; shared iden-tification with the movement opposing that injustice; and a shared inter-est in, and demand for, changes in the polity, economy, or perhaps (asFriedland argues in this issue) most significantly, in civil society. ForMansbridge (2001b:241), the full maturation of oppositional conscious-ness would “incorporate a well-worked-out, internally coherent set ofideas and beliefs” that analyze the injustice in terms of causality andrelations of domination/subordination. To some extent, the AAMs mayhave a more developed oppositional culture (Mansbridge 2001b:242)than oppositional consciousness. Our students’ surveys confirmed thatwhile consumers, across socioeconomic status, wish to see increasedavailability of locally produced food and are keenly aware of socialinequality in food access in their community, they express a relativelyhigh level of satisfaction with the existing food system (Castellano et al.2009). In other words, the AAMs have not elaborated the sense ofinjustice requisite to developing an oppositional consciousness, thoughthey have developed cultural (as well as economic, political, and social)practices that function, even if latently, to oppose, subvert, or detour theconventional agrifood system.

Mansbridge (2001b:242) recognizes the possibility of oppositionalcultures emerging without oppositional consciousness. Such cultures are“relatively unfocused . . . too variegated, too full of unrelated and some-times contradictory elements.” They may be “almost entirely reactive andresistant” but can “often intertwine and coexist easily with dominantcultures.” This describes well Allen’s (2004) concern with the lack of

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attention to social justice issues in the sustainable agriculture movementor Hinrichs’s (2003) concept of defensive localism as a tendency towardcultural protectionism expressed in the “eat local” movement. In Zaldand McCarthy’s (1990) terms, the movement’s constituents still need toconvert beneficiaries and potential beneficiaries into adherents (cogni-tive supporters) who identify with the movement, if the movement is toachieve more than a sporadic, purely self-interested market opportunityand, instead, come to think of themselves as participants in the AAMs.Our article describes an integrated teaching, research, and outreachprogram on Lexington community food assessment that may, by exam-ining these alternative/oppositional practices, enhance certain dimen-sions of an emergent oppositional consciousness in the AAMs, thuslending useful critical support.

The questions posed by Friedland (2010) resonate with a call forpublic scholarship and community engagement, similar to recent claimsby university administrators and professional organizations, such as theAmerican Sociological Association (ASA). Addressing the question“How should we proceed?” Michael Burawoy’s ASA presidential addressof 2005 makes a case for analytically distinguishing public sociology (a“systematic back translation” of our accumulated conversion of“common sense into science” that makes “public issues out of privatetroubles” [2005:5]) from: professional sociology (“the true and testedmethods, accumulated bodies of knowledge, orienting questions, andconceptual frameworks” [10]), critical sociology (“the conscience ofprofessional sociology” [10]), and policy sociology (“in the service of agoal defined by a client” [9]). He argues that, in the best case scenario,each complements the others, pointing to public sociology as the“complement and not the negation of” and even as the “conscience” ofpolicy sociology (10). Thus, to provide “useful critical support” forAAMs, we must integrate public sociology with these other sociologies.

The politics of food may be particularly amenable to inspiring imagi-native new ways to bring university and community members closertogether to pursue public scholarship and community engagement.Allen (2004) contends that both the sustainable agriculture and com-munity food-security movements have been remarkably successful inachieving their objectives within powerful institutions such as the U.S.Department of Agriculture (USDA) and land-grant universities. This wasaccomplished, in part, by first facilitating in civil society new institutionssuch as farmers’ markets, CSAs, institutional buying, and food policycouncils, thus pushing USDA, extension services, and the land-grantuniversities to follow, rather than lead, these developments (Hassanein1999).

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However, these calls for public scholarship and community engage-ment have not yet translated into systematic efforts by universitiesor professional organizations to humanize academic lives. Burawoy(2005:5) argues that, for academics, “[p]rogress becomes a battery ofdisciplinary techniques.” Tenure and promotion decisions are still pri-marily based on narrow criteria. Achievements in public scholarship andcommunity engagement are less likely to be valued as relevant criteriafor tenure and promotion. Thus, such activities become part of ourever-growing overloads, making it difficult to sustain involvement.

Like numerous North American universities and colleges, the Univer-sity of Kentucky has recently developed campus-wide teaching, research,and outreach initiatives to address alternative agrifood issues. Someexamples include: farms-to-cafeteria dining programs in dorms, commu-nity gardens on university properties, and interdisciplinary undergradu-ate curricula concerning sustainable agriculture, sustainable living, andworld food issues. This institutional environment and our interface withthese different sociologies provides the context for reflection on ourmediating role in the construction of knowledge about what constitutesa good food system, that is, viewed by the public as not only adequate butalso fair and just. Our task, then, given Friedland’s questions, is to renderthat knowledge useful as critical support to AAMs.

This article uses the case of an evolving collaboration between certainscholars at the University of Kentucky and Kentucky’s AAM organiza-tions in pursuing food security (availability, accessibility, adequacy, andaffordability) and sustainability in Kentucky communities. Our case alsoraises practical issues, concerning tenure risks for a junior facultymember (Tanaka) and the demands of substantially increased adminis-trative duties for a senior faculty member (Mooney) as obstacles to thepursuit and continuity of the project. However, these problems arelargely overcome by recognizing, with Burawoy (2005), the significanceof students as a public and making the classroom a place where studentsand instructors can examine food systems and develop collaborativerelationships with other publics, such as community activist organiza-tions and people experiencing food insecurity.

We draw insights from various literatures, principally on social move-ments and science studies, to discuss the tensions between conventionaland alternative agrifood systems, and between experts and lay publics inthe politics of knowledge. We critically reflect on the role of academicscholarship in enabling and constraining social movements and explorenew possibilities for reframing and realigning the value of the sociologi-cal imagination. Particularly significant are Burawoy’s (2005) analysis ofpublic sociology and Latour’s (2007) emphasis on the sociology of asso-


ciations. We show how the classroom becomes an excellent space forsociologists to assume the role of translating and back-translatingamong multiple lay publics and experts because it allows us to bringheterogeneous—social, material, ideological—actors (or connectors)together, trace their associations, and examine what enables and con-strains these associations in a particular food system from local to globallevels. Identifying both vulnerabilities and opportunities in the foodsystem under our analysis provides voice to those (e.g., the poor andminority population experiencing food insecurity) who are often silent.We show that, even as overworked scholars in a land-grant university, itis possible to provide critical support to AAMs by developing with themthe tools needed to justify their actions, help them make new connec-tions, reassemble existing associations and, perhaps, elaborate an oppo-sitional consciousness to facilitate realization of their vision of a goodfood system.

Our discussion represents collaboration-in-progress with the ongoingLexington Community Food Assessment project. Although we were bothtrained in rural sociology at midwestern land-grant universities andbelong to the University of Kentucky Sociology Department, we differsignificantly in age, gender, and ethnic background. We are natives oftwo quite different sociocultural places and agrifood systems (Tanakafrom suburban Japan and Mooney from the rural midwestern UnitedStates). We have distinctively different appointments at University ofKentucky (Tanaka largely from the College of Agriculture [COA];Mooney from the College of Arts and Sciences [A&S]), theoretical ori-entations, methodological training, and expertise within the sociology offood and agriculture. This work facilitated a reflection on our ownassumptions in our respective scholarship. We first provide an intellec-tual justification for the creation and circulation of maps of Lexingtoncommunity food access as part of research, teaching, and outreachactivities. The second section describes five stages of our collaborativeeffort to create and circulate those maps, followed by discussion oflessons learned from this process.

Mapping of Community Food Access and Mapping ofFood-Security Activism

The Lexington Community Food Assessment project originated inMooney’s special-topics course Food Security in the fall of 2004. Initially,the idea for conducting community food assessment as part of under-graduate teaching came from Mooney’s professional research interest ina broader range of food-security issues while serving in a policy-oriented


role as the Rural Sociological Society’s (RSS) representative to theCouncil for Agricultural Science and Technology. Since 2004, this evolv-ing curriculum has gone through six phases. In an integrated research-teaching project and effort to engage in public sociology, students fromvarious levels have participated in data collection. We have developedstronger collaborative relationships with various community organiza-tions as project partners. During the process, we were cognizant oftensions between experts, activists, and citizens in pursuing public schol-arship. This raises questions about how to conceptualize our role inknowledge politics so that the products of our scholarship would satisfyFriedland’s call to provide “useful critical support to the movement.”

Experts and Publics in Public Sociology

Through our scholarly activities as experts, we are often enrolled intothe processes of influencing the discourse of various social movements,whether as instructors, speakers at public forums, reviewers for grant-making organizations or professional journals, or witnesses at govern-ment hearings. This professional role can sharpen distinctions betweenlay knowledge and expertise, between intellectuals and publics, possiblyleading to an elitist understanding of social movements and to anxietyover the emerging gulf between the sociological ethos and the socialcurrents sociologists study (Burawoy 2005).

Activists play a significant role in framing public discourse. Ratherthan serving as passive recipients of expert knowledge, they constructknowledge from experience that can enhance expert knowledge as it isused to evaluate, contest, and improve expertise (Epstein 1996; Jasanoff2004; Woodhouse et al. 2002; Wynne 1996). In the best case, boththe public and scholars consciously engage one another. To engage inpublic sociology as useful support of AAMs, we also need to have thepublic engaged in sociology.

The initial impetus for our project was strongly influenced by Ken-tucky’s Community Farm Alliance (CFA), a grassroots membership orga-nization founded in 1985. With over 2,000 members in 75 Kentuckycounties, CFA is considered one of the most successful grassroots orga-nizations in the nation for addressing issues concerning the preservationof family farms and agricultural sustainability, and more recently, com-munity food security. At the state capital, CFA is considered to be one ofthe most powerful lobbying organizations on agricultural and ruraldevelopment policy issues (State Senator Joy Pendleton, personal com-munication, May 25, 2003).

In the fall of 2004, Mooney offered a special-topics course that pro-vided a broad overview of food security as three collective action


framings: (1) a problem of global hunger, malnutrition, underdevelop-ment, and dependency; (2) community food security; and (3) risk inrelation to food safety and bioterrorist concerns (see Mooney and Hunt2009). Each framing constituted a module. The module on communityfood security brought CFA into the course. At the time, CFA was begin-ning its Local Independent Food Economy (LIFE) project in theLouisville, Kentucky, and Lexington metropolitan areas. The LIFEobjectives were for Kentuckians “to benefit by consuming most of theirfood from local farms, Kentucky farmers to make a living from their landand open[ing] the door for a new generation of farmers to prosper”(Community Farm Alliance 2003:10). This first classroom project drewheavily from What’s Cooking in Your Food System? A Guide to Community FoodAssessment, published by a national-level social-movement organization,the Community Food Security Coalition (CFSC) (2002). Hence, CFSC’sunderstanding of food security, mediated through CFA’s local actions,continued to inform the conceptualization of the problem in each itera-tion of the course.1 In designing and executing each course, we soughtadvice from leaders in community and activist organizations andbrought in speakers from these organizations as our experts. In otherwords, we brought the movement to the university, rather than viceversa. We treated these speakers, the CFSC textbook, and CFA’s reportson the LIFE project as examples of the public practicing sociology and asexperts who assisted our engagement in public sociology. Although ourstudents interfaced with professional sociology, as we trained them toconduct good sociology in these courses, they thrived at the interfacebetween public sociology and critical sociology. In the interactionbetween the scholarship and bright, articulate, activist leaders, ideasconcerning food security started to come together our students’ realitygrounded in concrete and observable social practices and institutionalprocesses. As the project continues, a need to engage in policy sociologyhas facilitated a coalition among activist organizations and communityleaders to organize a food-policy council.

The creation of a food-policy council is a good place to bring togetherexpert and public knowledge to address local issues surrounding food.By doing so, the food-policy council will demand local leaders andactivists situate local problems in a global context of food insecurity andenvironmental and social injustice.

1 The CFSC (2008) defines community food security as “a condition in which all com-munity residents obtain a safe, culturally acceptable, nutritionally adequate diet through asustainable food system that maximizes community self-reliance and social justice.”


Circulation of Local to Global

In both the sustainable-agriculture and community food-security move-ments, environmental justice and social justice are treated as key criteriafor building a good food system (Beus and Dunlap 1992; Clancy 1993;Dahlberg 1991; Kloppenburg, Hendrickson, and Stevenson 1996). Thismeans that “a larger epistemological framework for analysis than that oftraditional agricultural science” is required “in order to find commonground and see beyond constructed dichotomies such as productionand consumption” (Allen 2004:17). Yet as work on the politics ofagricultural-science knowledge (Busch and Lacy 1983; Tanaka andBhavsar 2008) shows, the domination of natural science in the episte-mology of agricultural science is constantly reproduced in the institu-tional processes for: research funding at USDA; priority setting in thesystems of state agricultural experiment stations and cooperative exten-sion services; and performance evaluations by university administrators.In the university’s sustainable-agriculture curriculum, the number ofcredit hours required from the social sciences component of the cur-riculum is considerably less than is required from natural sciencecourses. Community food-security groups tend to ask for more technicalassistance from natural scientists, such as for building a communitygarden plot, than from social scientists for assessing neighbors’ needs forsuch a plot. How can we improve our position in the politics of knowl-edge for building the AAMs?

Agrifood studies tend to blackbox (Latour 1987), or take for granted,practices and mechanisms behind the construction of scientific knowl-edge that provides natural scientists with power to shape social andnatural orders. Science studies investigate the processes of stabilizingsocial and scientific practices surrounding knowledge construction. Byfocusing on the role of tools, instruments, equipment, and other inscrip-tion devices, such investigation shows how knowledge produced throughsituated practices and interaction, such as those observed in the labora-tory or experiment field, is transformed into what Latour (1987) callsimmutable mobili (e.g., objects, concepts), which are transportable andusable outside the research sites (Clarke and Fujimura 1992; Latour1988). These devices help standardize, formalize, and economizeknowledge-production practices in diverse sociopolitical settings. Howcan we create immutable mobili? In other words, what else besidesjournal articles, book chapters, and academic books do we want tocirculate for public consumption?

Latour (2007:3) explains actor network theory as the tracing of asso-ciations, or the sociology of associations, contending that the sociology


of the social has “simply confused what [it] should explain with theexplanation.” As we study society, how can we work without such keyconcepts as social order, social structure, and social force? His pointdemands critical reflection on our shortcomings in explaining to non-sociologists, including our students, what society is made of and howglobal forces shape our everyday practices at local sites, and more impor-tantly, on producing immutable mobili to support the reframing ofepistemology required to realize environmentally and socially just foodsystems.

In our ongoing project, the focal point was originally a somewhatmutable, but still highly mobile map of Lexington. Across various phases,students worked on mapping the distribution of food access in Lexingtonby driving and walking around different neighborhoods and visitingestablishments. In some cases, students interacted with people insidethose establishments, sometimes in conflictual interactions. Our inten-tion was to facilitate students’ learning about food systems in Lexingtoncommunities through building this map. Over five years, students keptadding information to the map, filling it with color-coded dots indicatingspecific places and color-coded fills indicating unique characteristics ofneighborhoods. Thus, students can see not only where food establish-ments (e.g., grocery stores, restaurants, convenience stores) are locatedbut also how these locations are linked to the spatial distribution ofpoverty and racialized residential segregation. In other words, mappinghas allowed students to “follow how dimensions [of society] are generatedand maintained” (Latour 2007:172). This helped students observe thesocial structure of stratification—what it consists of and how it shapespeople’s food access, particularly in terms of class, gender, race, andethnicity.

Students recognized how their location in the structure shapes theirworldviews. When they were thrown into unfamiliar places, their culturalassumptions and social conventions collided with those of other socio-economic strata or ethnic backgrounds. One white female student wasreluctant to drive around in a “bad neighborhood of Lexington” aloneeven during the daylight. Some students felt culture shock when walkinginto an ethnic grocery store in which workers spoke little English and“weird-looking” food was being sold. An African American student wassurprised to learn that the “Jews” whom she saw as exploiting her neigh-bors were, in fact, Palestinian.

Mapping also enabled us to make visible the obscure workings of theconventional agrifood system, for example, how giant retailers under-mine local businesses, how corporate food establishments treat consum-ers inequitably, and so on. It provides a powerful tool for students to


understand how locally situated practices of food consumption arelinked to global problems, such as concentration of capital within thefood industry, the domination of transnational corporations in shapingfood culture, and hunger and malnutrition of specific populations. Atthe same time, local exploitations are equally important in buildingtensions among racial and ethnic groups and perpetuating prejudices,intolerance, and occasional violence.

Our first research report produced several maps. These, along withour report itself, were our inscription devices (Law 2006) that constructparticular realities about both physical (natural) and social orders ofLexington for accessing food. They became both maps of physical loca-tions of food retail and restaurant establishments and of social locationsof individuals, groups, and organizations. By tracing associations amongvarious material and social variables depicted on the maps, students wereable to see how physical and social landscapes were coconstructed. Theywere forced to carefully observe the materiality of our taken-for-grantedlifeworld (Berger and Luckmann 1966) in order to unpack their assump-tions about distance, and to make statements through the maps aboutlinkages between physical distance and social distance.

These maps became catalysts for building new associations andstrengthening old ones among individuals and groups. To expand theLexington Community Food Assessment from merely a class assignmentto a multiyear integrated teaching and research project, we enrolledmany individual and organizational actors, tools, materials, and funds.These maps are intelligible and portable, helping us to crossboundaries—including those between institutions (academic and activ-ist organizations), forms of scholarship (e.g., teaching, research,and outreach), and disciplines (e.g., horticulture, nutrition, andsociology)—and to stabilize these associations.

From a Map with Thumb Tags to Multiple Colored Maps in a PDF File

Thus far, approximately 80 students (from freshmen to PhD candidates)from four courses have participated in the project. The design of classassignments reflected differences in the course content and the level ofstudents. The phases described here reflect our trials and errors inmaintaining scientific standards in this ongoing research. Althoughfrom the beginning there was an assumption that this assignment wouldshow causal relationships between food insecurity and poverty, it was notuntil the summer of 2006 when we began to map food establishmentsthrough the Geographic Information System (GIS) with data from theU.S. Census that we could begin to systematically analyze in order to


understand causal relationships. Greater detail on the following courses(course syllabi) can be found on the project website (http://www.uky.edu/Ag/CLD/lcfa/).

Phase 1. SOC350: Food Security (Fall 2004)

In Lexington–Fayette County, the number of grocery stores declined incoincidence with an increase in population, translating to a significantincrease in the population served by each grocery store (U.S. CensusBureau 1999, 2000, 2005, 2006). In this context, one major componentof Mooney’s undergraduate class, Food Security, started with simplequestions such as: (1) Where are grocery stores and dining establish-ments located in Lexington? (2) What do their locations tell us aboutfood security in Lexington?

The course began with readings on global hunger issues and guestspeakers from Bread for the World, Kentucky’s CFA, leading farmersassociated with the Lexington farmers’ markets and provisioning of localrestaurants, and representatives of the local food pantry. Students weredivided into eight groups, each assigned to identify and record all foodretail and dining establishments in one of eight sectors of FayetteCounty. This initial identification of food-source establishments wasdone with a combination of the use of phone books, use of healthdepartment data, and simply driving or walking in these regions. Thenthese students conducted a comparative market-basket survey at 53stores, including 22 grocery stores.2

The spatial data that students collected by hand were transferred to asingle map of Lexington on a large corkboard with color-coded thumbtags. The resulting map showed patterns in the geographical distributionof food retail and dining establishments. It confirmed that there wereindeed food deserts in Lexington. While a few food-desert areas arewealthy neighborhoods in which most residents likely own cars, the mapsshowed a huge area with no supermarkets in a low-income region ofnortheastern Lexington.

During this first phase, the Lexington Community Food Assessmentwas successful merely as a teaching tool for conducting critical sociology,facilitating students’ examination of food access as a public issue and anexpression of social inequality. Through the exercise, many undergradu-ate students, who had hardly questioned how a food system might serve

2 This market basket was based on USDA’s operationalization: apples (1 lb.), lettuce(1 lb.), potatoes (1 lb.), tomatoes (1 lb.), frozen broccoli (1 lb.), fresh broccoli (1 lb.),cheddar cheese (1 lb.), ground beef (1 lb.), chicken, fryer whole or cut up (1 lb.), spaghetti(1 lb. box), milk (1 gallon of 1 percent), eggs (1 dozen).


as a space for reproducing social inequality, came to understand howcertain mechanisms create social and spatial marginalization. Yet theassignment had little value as professional sociology. There was minimalsystematic training of students to be researchers prior to the assignment.Consequently, the quality of data was far from adequate for furtheranalysis for four reasons. First, the locations of food retail and diningestablishments were mostly compiled by hand (and foot), rather thanfrom systematic sources. Because each region was relatively large and theeffort was not evenly distributed among students within or betweengroups, many data were missing or incorrect. Second, downtown Lex-ington was divided into eight wedged-shaped areas, and consequentlythe project was not effective in capturing data from some neighborhoodswith high poverty rates. Third, there were inconsistencies in the market-basket survey data. Some students had difficulty finding market-basketitems such as “cut-up (or whole) fryer chicken” or did not know what itmeant (and did not ask). Finally, several small-scale grocers were unco-operative with students documenting prices. The huge variation in theavailable brands for some products made it impossible to verify that theselection of food items was consistent.

Nevertheless, the thumb-tagged map of Lexington Community FoodAssessment began to take on a life beyond the course and travel outsidethe classroom. We started to realize the potential use of mapping as anentry point to practice public sociology and policy sociology.

Phase 2. CFA’s LIFE Project (Spring 2005–Summer 2006)

As residents of Kentucky, both authors have been members of CFA formany years and have consulted with the organization on previousprojects, including Mooney’s documentation of Kentucky AfricanAmerican farmers’ oral histories and Tanaka’s assessment of attitudestoward genetically modified crops.

In the past, the relationship between the COA and the CFA was notalways cordial, at times perhaps hostile. Although discussion of therecent transformation of Kentucky agriculture is beyond the scope ofthis article, suffice it to say that the collapse of tobacco as an economi-cally viable commodity in the late 1990s created new opportunities forthese two institutions to reach out for dialogue and collaboration. Bothinstitutions championed support for tobacco farmers, however differenttheir perspectives and clients might be. CFA’s legislative victory in 2000to ensure that tobacco settlement funds be used in tobacco regions, andCFA’s continued influence over allocation of those funds, was particu-larly significant in bringing the COA closer to a new interest in those


areas that CFA had long identified as in need of research and supportfrom the college.3 During the posttobacco era, both institutions neededdifferent types of expertise, experience, collaboration, and settings topursue their new agendas (i.e., agricultural diversification, sustainableagriculture, and rural development) and build links between ruralfarmers and urban consumers.

At the CFA’s annual meeting in January 2005 in Lexington, Mooneypresented the thumb-tagged map of Lexington Community Food Accessdeveloped by his students. A CFA community organizer was assigned todevelop this map into a tool for organizing support for the LIFE projectin Lexington. Although the map was effective in justifying the need forthe project, the map on a three-by-four foot corkboard was less than fullymutable. The data needed to be entered into GIS to generate maps thatcould be used for further analysis as well as for presentations. It quicklybecame obvious that the task was beyond the organizer’s capacity. Shecould not maintain enough CFA volunteers to carry out additional food-access mapping. This is when building maps became a collaborativeproject of Tanaka from COA, Mooney from A&S, and the CFA.

Mooney’s involvement declined somewhat after 2005 when heassumed additional administrative responsibilities. During the summerof 2006, Tanaka obtained the list of active establishments inspected bythe Health Department of the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Govern-ment (LFUCG). COA provided a small grant to support a summergraduate research assistant from the Geography Department in mappingfood retailers, excluding dining establishments, using GIS. The spatialdistribution of food retailers in Lexington was then combined with basicdemographic data from the 2000 U.S. Census, including median house-hold income, poverty rates, racial-minority population, and vehicle-ownership rates.

This helped confirm that the distribution of food access in Lexingtonis strongly associated with rates of poverty and African American popu-lation. No large-scale grocery store is located within the 40508 zip coderegion, which has the highest percentage of impoverished householdsand one of the highest proportions of African American populationwithin Lexington (U.S. Census Bureau 2000). Various GIS maps gener-ated during this phase helped us begin examining food security as anarena for our scholarly collaboration. We started to explore differentapproaches to teaching, research, and outreach to use unequal foodaccess as a Durkheimian social fact. Until the fall of 2009, and a course

3 This matter could easily form an article in itself and, indeed, may be the subject offorthcoming work by one of our current graduate students.


team-taught by both authors, Tanaka taught all the subsequent coursesthat used the Lexington Community Food Assessment, althoughMooney participated in designing each research component.

Phase 3. SOC517: Rural Sociology (Fall 2006)

To assess food insecurity in areas with high poverty rates, we believedthat case studies would be effective as methods for both collectingprecise data and training graduate students in specific sociologicalresearch skills. During this phase, seven graduate students in Tanaka’sRural Sociology course were divided into two groups to conduct casestudies of Lexington North (two census tracts) and Lexington South(three census tracts). According to the 2000 census, the 5,500 residentsof North Lexington share a poverty rate of 43 percent, and a mediumincome slightly over $16,500. Lexington North is 62 percent AfricanAmerican and 5 percent Hispanic (probably higher at this writing), andmore than one-third of the residents do not have a vehicle. Although 45percent of the 9,500 residents of Lexington South live in poverty, thesetracts are only 17 percent African American and 3 percent Hispanic.Only 13 percent of the households live without a car, which is relativelylow compared with other areas with high poverty rates in Lexington.This area borders the university’s campus and a large proportion of theresidents in this area are students, explaining the high level of residentswith a vehicle and reflecting quite a different kind of poverty than thatobserved in North Lexington.

As part of the course project, students examined four research ques-tions to understand food insecurity in Lexington: (1) What is the qualityof food access in each case-study area? (2) What challenges do residentsface in accessing adequate quality food? (3) How does access to foodrelate to broader social problems of inequality? (4) What politicalactions seem to be appropriate to address the problem of food insecu-rity? To answer these questions, students employed three methods: (1)mapping of food establishments, (2) a market-basket survey of retailfood establishments, and (3) interviews with community leaders. Eachgroup discussed and determined how members would evaluate thequality and adequacy of food as well as issues of social inequality in foodaccess and how they would develop their own recommendations forpolitical actions. Before data collection began, all students completedthe Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative program to be certi-fied by the university’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) as authorizedresearch personnel on the project.

To improve the reliability of mapping data, the two groups began byverifying the GIS maps with grocery-store points and the list of food


establishments inspected by the LFUCG’s Health Department. Toimprove data reliability, students purchased certain items for the market-basket survey. Each student took detailed observation notes about thephysical and interactional environments inside and outside of each facil-ity and shared these notes with teammates. Interviews with communityleaders were a new component that aimed to assess community needs byidentifying community organizations in Lexington that work on food-security issues and to understand those organizations’ perspectives onfood access. One goal of adding this component was to develop aninterview protocol and evaluate it as both a teaching and research tool.

As an instructional tool, the project was used to systematically trainstudents in the processes and techniques of sociological research, fromoperationalizing research questions to writing reports through fiveresearch-skill-development workshop sessions. Their data documentednot only the lack of grocery stores but also the severely limited availabilityof USDA market-basket items, particularly fresh produce, in these neigh-borhoods. Moreover, the interview assignment identified additionalstakeholders for our research and outreach activities.

Fieldwork facilitated students’ development of their own perspectiveon food access as a social (or public) problem, rather than simply thepersonal troubles of individual residents (Mills 1959). By the end of thesemester, students were debating power dynamics between “service pro-viders” and “clients”; differences between “leaders for the community”and “leaders in the community”; and mismatches between “perceivedneeds” and “real needs.” In short, by mapping food access, or geographi-cal distancing, these students were conceptualizing how food becomes avehicle for social distancing and examining such exclusion as a feature ofthe unjust social structure. In this sense, SOC517 was successful in facili-tating these graduate students’ simultaneous pursuit of critical, profes-sional, and public sociologies.

Phase 4. HON115: World Food Issues II—Daily Bread (Spring 2007)

During the fourth phase, 14 undergraduate honors students in Tanaka’sWorld Food Issues II carried out another set of market-basket surveysamong 22 large-scale grocery stores across Lexington.4 This course is thesecond required course in the world food issues track of the university’sHonors Program, which is taught by instructors from diverse disciplines.

4 This group includes one of the last surviving grocery chains owned by a local family,which now operates one store in Lexington and four outside Lexington, and a verysuccessful, locally owned and operated cooperative business, which began as a buying clubin 1972.


This course aims for students to examine a variety of food-related issues(e.g., hunger, nutrition, food culture, food safety) from social scienceperspectives first as their personal troubles, and then as public problems.As freshmen or sophomores, most of these students lived in the dormsand hardly ever cooked or shopped for groceries.

For the research project, we needed data with which to compare themarket-basket prices in Lexington North and Lexington South, col-lected by SOC517 students. For an instructional tool, Tanaka needed anassignment that could be carried out by lower-level, but highly moti-vated, undergraduate students with little or no experience in reflectingon food consumption as a social act. The market-basket survey wasconducted as one of five research-skill-development exercises. Most stu-dents recorded the price data while they shopped for a “feast exercise”module of the course or for their weekly supplies. After we collated pricedata from various stores, the price differences among these large-scalestores, particularly between the two grocers of “healthy food”) and therest, became obvious to the students. In the class discussion, besides foodprices at the stores they visited, these students reported on physicalappearances of the stores, social characteristics of workers and custom-ers, social interactions between people inside and outside the stores, andtheir impressions of adjacent neighborhoods. For a course with fewsocial science majors, this assignment facilitated comparisons betweennatural and social science research processes. Basic sociological conceptssuch as class, status, structure, and agency, to name a few, came to life inthe class discussion.

The data collected from SOC517 and HON115 finally enabled us toproduce a set of GIS maps, tables, and figures that can be used tosystematically illustrate the spatial distribution of food access and socialinequality and the extent of food insecurity in certain areas in Lexing-ton. In short, students from these courses helped us “lay continuousconnections [surrounding food retailing and consumption] leadingfrom one local interaction to the other places, times, and agenciesthrough which a local site is made to do something” (Latour 2007:173,original emphasis), in our case, enabling and constraining access tonutritionally and culturally adequate food at affordable prices forLexington residents.

Phase 5. Linking the AAMs with the Classroom (Spring 2007 andFall 2008)

Since the fall of 2007, new opportunities have arisen to expand theproject by linking multiple ongoing initiatives on the campus and in the


community. In January 2008, Tanaka completed the first LexingtonCommunity Food Assessment project report (Tanaka et al. 2008). Todate, approximately 600 printed copies have been distributed at variousnodes of the AAM network in Kentucky, including the 2008 and 2009annual meetings of the CFA; the Green and Healthy Schools RegionalSummit (March 2008) and the “Closing the Food Gap Workshop”(October 2008) in Lexington, organized by the Sustainable Communi-ties Network; and the 2008 Health Foods and Local Farms Conference inLouisville, organized by the Sierra Club (September 2008). The reportwas made available initially through the CFA website, and since Decem-ber 2008 on our own website (http://www.uky.edu/Ag/CLD/lcfa/).

This report has become another immutable mobili that has helped ustie our public sociology more closely to policy sociology in two importantways. First, the report has increased our credibility as experts on Lexing-ton community food-security issues and helped us to continuously createnew associations with individual and organizational actors, materials,and ideas, thus building strong collaborative relationships with diverseorganizations beyond the CFA. Many of these actors are working ondifferent aspects of AAMs, including sustainable living, community andschool gardening, farmers’ markets, institutional buying, neighborhood-based healthy-eating programs, after-school programs, and sustainableagriculture, to name a few. Second, the report has helped justify theseAAMs’ and other organizations’ effort to build local food economies andhealthy-eating culture through their own initiatives and collaborationsamong themselves. We have used the report to develop research grantproposals, and community organizations have used it to support theirinitiatives. Significantly, this report facilitated activists’ planning of thefirst “Closing the Food Gap Workshop,” for the creation of a localfood-policy council. The workshop was cosponsored by various groupsincluding the LFUCG, the university, and the Fayette County PublicSchool System and brought CFSC’s Mark Wynne, a national-level experton food-policy councils, to work with a wide range of area stakeholderson processes and mechanics of organizing a food-policy council. Asprelude to the event, Tanaka was asked to write a short article in acommunity newspaper to inform the readers about challenges of localfood access.

Phase 6. A “Good” Food System

Following a semester abroad for sabbatical leaves, we began to discussthe research work necessary to support these activist organizations’ cre-ation of a food-policy council. This led to using the Lexington Commu-


nity Food Assessment as another course project in SOC517: RuralSociology for the fall of 2008 to investigate Lexington residents’ con-cerns about food-related issues. This time, 15 students (9 undergraduateand 6 graduate students) completed the survey of shoppers and semi-structured interviews with community leaders to answer the followingfour questions: (1) Who is concerned about what food-related issues? (2)What do residents believe makes a “good” food system? (3) What do theysee as challenges in addressing their concerns about food? (4) What dothey suggest as possible solutions for creating what they consider to be agood food system? In consultation with colleagues, we developed surveyand interview instruments and applied for IRB approval before thesemester began. Tanaka provided research-skill training sessions withhelp from colleagues specialized in survey and qualitative research.

Over two consecutive weekends in October, for two hours, studentscarried out face-to-face survey interviews (N = 332) at five food retailoutlets. Students were responsible for entering the data collected intothe SPSS software database, and to prepare an analysis in the form of aPowerPoint presentation. The class gave a public presentation, “Tell Usabout Your Food Concerns: Lexington Community Food Assessment2008, Consumer Survey Results,” in a university lecture hall. Theyemphasized the high level of concerns among Lexington residents withnearly every food-related issue mentioned in the survey, differencesamong shoppers in the types of concerns they have, and a high level ofdesire to make local food widely available. A news release (Spence 2008)was distributed widely, and several agriculture- (e.g., eXtension, CattleNetwork News), business- (e.g., Business Lexington), and food-relatednews sources (e.g., Living section of the Lexington Herald-Leader) pub-lished it. A local NPR radio station interviewed Tanaka about the keysurvey findings (Davis 2008). Such publicity increased the credibility ofour work in this project and helped us build additional linkages withuniversity scholars (extending now to those from the College of Medi-cine) and community organizations.

Students also completed 20 interviews with a wide range of commu-nity leaders, including four LFUCG Council members and one Kentuckystate senator. Even those who initially asserted that food access was not aconcern of their organizations shared the view that challenges lie in thelack of food knowledge, time for cooking and eating healthy meals, andfinancial resources to access healthy food.

Six graduate students integrated the survey and interview data indrafting two group research reports (three students per group) andindividually developed proposals for outreach tools. The latter was a newcomponent encouraging students to practice public and policy sociolo-


gies. The proposals included a mini farmers’ market in a low-incomeneighborhood, a mobile market, a healthy-living program for collegestudents, a healthy-eating youth summer camp, a statewide food-policycouncil, and a school garden. In the presentation describing outreachtools, each student identified his or her clients and explained measuresused to evaluate its success.

Our next steps are to work with AAM activists to identify, collect, andanalyze the data necessary for the formation of a food-policy council.This might include needs assessment of certain neighborhoods, updatedGIS mapping, and additional interviews with community and businessleaders. We team-taught in the fall of 2009 a mixed graduate- andundergraduate-level course with a strong service learning componentoriented to the formation of a food-policy council.

Lessons Learned: Toward Integrating the Four Sociologies

Three dimensions of sociological scholarship—research, instruction,and outreach—potentially contribute elements to an oppositional con-sciousness. The research exposes inequities in the food system, serving asa mechanism by which students (via experiential learning) and thepublic may identify the food system as a source of injustice. Neither theresearch nor the instruction should expect or prod an opposition to thatinjustice but serve only as a values-clarification exercise for adjudicatingthe newly recognized objective situation by individuals’ own values. Asoutreach, the research can enhance the mobilizing capacity of thoseactivists already operating from an injustice framing with materials thatcarry the legitimacy of carefully collected data. It is then their role toconvert beneficiaries, potential beneficiaries, and potential constituentsinto adherents who share identification with the movement opposingthe injustice.

We find our Lexington Community Food Assessment project to haveclosely reflected the theme of the 2009 RSS Annual Meeting, “RuralSociology as Public Sociology: Past, Present, Future.” Gilbert (2009:20,emphasis added) raised a call for renewing the role of rural sociologistsin expanding opportunities for participatory democracy, by asking “wheretoday do we see such radical public efforts to redistribute wealth andother community-building resources to non-elites? How might we simi-larly approach, in spirit if not in letter, the urgent problems of our day?”These are potent questions if we as rural sociologists wish to sustain ourtradition of “doing practical research” in an increasingly resource-constrained academic environment (Gilbert 2009:8, citing Carl Taylor).

To simultaneously satisfy academic requirements and a commitmentto activism, it is important for scholars to develop tighter and stronger


linkages between research, teaching, and outreach activities. In develop-ing our project, we recognized from the beginning that this pro-ject serves at least three publics: students, community and activistorganizations, and people experiencing food insecurity. Over six yearsof carrying out the project, we have learned that Burawoy’s foursociologies—professional, critical, policy, and public—are four distinc-tive, though interrelated, actor-networks in Latour’s (2007) sociology ofassociations. How these three publics are enrolled in the project affectshow these four sociologies produce knowledge and products that can bevaluable to each public.

To examine and address community food-security issues, each sociol-ogy requires different sets of actors, associations, logic, values, ethics,and practices. Both activists and students brought different knowledges,expertise, experiences, and ideologies to us. CFA, in particular, broughtthe view from the farm and the organization’s interpretation of urbanlife and food consumers. CFA had a practical interest in creating amarket outlet for farmers as well as an emergent moral and ethical ornormative interest in alleviating hunger, an often neglected aspect ofthis alternative-food movement (Allen 2004). Students brought a prac-tical interest in a grade for the assignment, and some brought practicaland technical experience and interests as food-service workers, grocery-store employees, and customers. The students may identify with thesubordinate in an unjust food system through the map indicating fooddeserts and poverty in both the student neighborhood and the poorAfrican American neighborhood. Beyond that, the course material reso-nated with a somewhat detached understanding that this might matter tothem eventually.

Following Burawoy’s (2005:7, 9) claim that students are “our first andcaptive public . . . we turn their private troubles into public issues,” westarted from the classroom as a space for public scholarship. Our stu-dents interfaced with a professional sociology, insofar as we were trainingthem to practice good sociology. The lapses we note, especially in thefirst course, with respect to rigor, undermined the validity of the data,even as it became clearer that the idea of having such data was quiteconstructive. It remained for the next courses to both add to the profes-sional aspects, done better (more easily and effectively, though notperhaps more importantly) with honors students and graduate students,and move toward cross-disciplinary approaches.

This aspect of professional sociology ensures that critical support isalso useful. The production of information with less than rigorousmethod or driven more by ideological interest than professional stan-dards may easily lend a disservice to the public and to the AAMs. Further,


as Gaventa (2009:34) notes in response to Gilbert (2009), many cam-paigns for greater democratization have involved an alliance of civil-society actors with academic and technical specialists who can not onlyprovide valuable data and information but also provide some legitimacyto grassroots campaigns and ensure that elites “could not dismiss out ofhand the claims being made by civil society.” For Gaventa (34), “[t]herole of the academic was not to support more democratic policiesdirectly but to help to mobilize and strengthen the knowledge of ordi-nary citizens, who in turn contributed to policy change.”

This is why CFA, a prominent activist organization on agriculture,food, and farming issues in Kentucky, was also very much on our mindsat the outset with a need for and interest in possible market outlets fortheir fruit and vegetable producers. Significantly, their LIFE programalso framed the matter as a social justice concern. This relationship isperhaps better reflected by Burawoy’s (2005:7) “organic public sociol-ogy” insofar as our relationship became one with a “visible, thick, active,local and often counterpublic.” To some extent, CFA’s role might actu-ally have crossed over from that of a public to being a client, againmoving the work closer toward policy sociology.

Unfortunately, people experiencing food insecurity themselves wereless directly enrolled in this project, moving the public sociology towarda critical sociology in which we took a certain normative and moral visionof what a “good” food system might look like for them. That vision,however, was shaped by CFA and CFSC as “clients,” thus providing“critical support” for their project. This critical position, however,remained open to debate and discussion among the students as a public.

Gaventa (2009) asks public sociology to be alert to the opening of newpolitical opportunity structures. Such an opportunity has now emergedwith the local campaign for a food-policy council. Thus, the project isnow more fully engaging in a policy sociology. Our current steps enrollstudents into the local food-policy council movement in the Bluegrassregion. The prior work has helped to set the table for bringing the ideaof a food-policy council to primary stakeholders in the region. Thus, ournext steps bring students into a wider stakeholder arena that may reveal“how narrow and constrained our own current policy discussions actuallyare” (Gilbert 2009:20, citing A. O’Connor).

Perhaps more importantly this harkens back even to the visions ofCarl Taylor that Gilbert (2009:9) has awakened around the idea that“local neighborhoods and communities on up . . . must be tied togetherin national planning and action,” else the government will tend to beautocratic rather than democratic. Further, Burawoy’s (2009:25)response to Gilbert makes the claim that “[t]o work effectively, partici-


patory democracy requires some form of real and visible redistribution.”In our project, these are claims to a redistribution of access to food.Significantly, such claims direct attention to agricultural policy whosecharacteristic trait since Carl Taylor’s time has been to maintain scarcityof valuable commodities in the face of the “problem” of agricultural“overproduction.” Recognition of this contradiction, in turn, opens thedoor to oppositional consciousness.

In summary, to “provide useful critical support,” public sociologymust be professional to be useful, must be willing to share a constituen-cy’s normative or moral position to be critical, and must eventually bepolicy oriented in order to support sustainable transformations that canameliorate the present condition. Despite constant shifts of students,community leaders, and stakeholders, we were successful in nurturingthis project because outputs of each phase of the project created newassociations for the next phase and allowed project participants to simul-taneously play multiple roles over time. For example, some students inone phase became community activists in the next phase. Six years later,our project allows us to simultaneously practice all four sociologiesbecause our immutable mobili—maps of food access in Lexington,research report (Tanaka et al. 2008), and project website—continue tocirculate among students, community leaders, stakeholders, mediareporters, and faculty members. New associations are constantly beingmade to encourage them to be “participants in [their] own history”(Gilbert 2009:5) by documenting (professional sociology), understand-ing (critical sociology), and addressing (policy sociology) food insecurityin Lexington. By doing so, our project continues with a life of its own asa product of public sociology.

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