I’ve been turned on to the “now” page as a place to try to update about what is most currently on my agenda. However, I’ve been confronted with a series of challenges to this task. First, wrist tendonitis that makes my computer time limited. Second, perpetual website management issues (ah, wordpress and its popularity among hackers as a target!). YET, I continue trying to live, and to share, and so here I am in July 2024 doing that!
As of today, I am mostly focused on:
- Healing from jet lag and from getting covid while on summer travels.
- Preparing for the Fall term at CSU East Bay, where I’ve been teaching in the AGES Program since Fall 2022.
- Fall 2023’s two classes were Sustainable Food Systems and Anthropology of Global Change.
- Spring 2023’s three classes (syllabi links): Sustainable Food Systems, Sustainability and Social Justice, and Sustainable Communities and Development.
- Fall 2024’s classes include a new one, Environmental Studies 101.
- Revising my PhD dissertation-based book manuscript, for MIT Press. (deadline!)
- Promoting the Zine version of the dissertation, available here.
- Writing a small book on “agrarian anarchism”. Hear some of my thinking, related to degrowth and food sovereignty, in this talk I just gave in Spain in June.
- Promoting this commentary I wrote for this special issue on Land and Sustainable Food Transitions, on the idea of “land reform” and why it’s not so visible in US food movement. Trying to turn this paper into an organizing project!
- Promoting a special issue of commentaries in JAFSCD relating to the first United States-focused Agroecology Summit, which I helped co-organize and took place in May 2023. Check the website for more details.
- this includes a piece I wrote with Garrett Graddy-Lovelace for that issue, on what the USDA would have to do to actually support agroecology in the USA.
- Waiting for final reviews on my chapter for a new edition of this now-classic book on Food Justice. With the great help of editor Alison Alkon, it’s entitled: “North Star politics of emancipation: how radical and BIPOC traditions influence food movement approaches to the market and state”.
- Organizing the Agroecology Research-Action Collective (ARC) in North America (website currently busted!)
- Finally gardening again more! At home in Berkeley, mostly. Also, started a new garden with my students at CSUEB!
- Promoting the two albums I have managed to make in recent years, this one in 2019 and this one 2022.
- Starting to play drums in a new band (“Yoots”) with very old friends/musicians, who I played with in bands literally DECADES ago. (Wow, I’m old). No bandcamp page yet. And sadly, guitarists keep quitting. Damn guitarists.
- Parenting a very charming child who is amazing, stays up late reading fantasy novels, but is sadly less interested these days in nature, plants, the outdoors, etc. Sigh.
- Surviving the COVID-19 pandemic that everyone seems to have decided is over. I’ve got it twice now, had the dreaded ‘coronasomnia’ afterwards, which comes and goes. Not fun.