Hi! I am Dr. Maria Elisa Christie, Director of Women and Girls in International Development at the Center for International Research, Education and Development. I'm sorry. Welcome to our Discussion Series. It's an inclusivity initiative of Outreach and International Affairs.
And it's our final event of this academic year. And we're happy you could join us in person and on Zoom. And our special event today will look at kitchen space in both international and regional Appalachia contexts.
Our visiting guest speaker is Dr. Kathleen Schroeder, Geography professor from Appalachian State University.
Her talk is titled Food and Resilience in Mountain Communities.
Gendered perspectives from the Andes and Appalachia. We also have two panelists from Virginia Tech.
Dr. Kim Niewolny and Dr. Danille Christensen. Dr. Niewolny is a professor in the Department of Agricultural, Leadership, and Community Education.
And the Director and Founder of the Center for Food Systems and Community Transformation.
Dr. Christensen is a folklorist and associate professor in the Department of Religion and Culture.
She studies vernacular culture and teaches Appalachian Studies and Food Studies courses. I'd like to do a check if somebody's on Zoom, can you confirm that people can see and hear me?
And see the screen of the PowerPoint that Okay, thank you. Why are we seeing that on the screen?
Instead of the PowerPoint. Yeah. Okay, you're going to change it in a minute.
So I want to thank our co-sponsors. Again, you can never thank the co-sponsors enough because that's what makes events like this possible. The Department of Geography, Food Studies, and the Center for Food Systems and Community Transformation.
And I also thank my graduate assistant, Pratirakshya Koirala, Master student in the Department of Geography, and Noriko Argue and CIRED for their work supporting the discussion series all year.
Okay, please note that we are recording this event. And it'll be available on our website and the VT Library website later.
So for all Zoom participants, by staying on now, you're consenting to be recorded. Then you can turn off your camera if you don't want your image recorded. I think we're going to be turning off any videos.
Anyway, otherwise you'll show up on the front here. So as of this morning, we had 52 people registered for this event, but that's before the Department of Geography literally stormed this room. So we actually have more.
Most of whom are actually on Zoom. But besides students, faculty, and staff from Virginia Tech in Blacksburg,
Richmond, Abingdon, Alexandria, Roanoke, Pembroke, and Centerville and the Virginia Cooperative Extension in Harrisonburg We also have folks joining us from the Ujama Cooperative Farming Alliance in Charlottesville,
Future Harvest, Iowa State University, UC Davis, and Yunnan Agricultural University in China.
And more that I may have missed. We just pick up. So thank you all and welcome.
Okay, some brief housekeeping notes. This event will last approximately an hour till 1.30.
And we'll start with a presentation by Dr. Schroeder. Then our two panelists will present, followed by a discussion amongst them.
And then we'll hope to have time at the end for a few questions. If you're on Zoom, you can post your questions anytime in the chat and we save them, collect them, and then I can read it from the later. And if you're in person at the end, you can raise your hand and we'll bring a mic to you so that everybody can hear.
In order for our discussion to be as rich as it can be, we need everyone to be respectful and treat all participants with kindness and consideration
without discriminatory behavior. If you'd like to enable captions, I think Pratirakshya will put in in the chat the instructions but you can set it up with your options.
In advance, I'd like to ask you now to please fill out the very short survey at the end. We'll send you a link to that.
And now to introduce the speaker. Kathleen Schroeder has an undergraduate degree in Economics and a Master's degree in Geography from the University of Texas at Austin.
Which is where my relationship with her lies. And a Doctorate in Geography from the University of Minnesota. She has extensive experience working on issues of gender and development, both domestically and abroad.
Her research has focused in the Andes, and particularly in Bolivia, where she uses a feminist economic lens to examine issues of women and work.
As a professor of Geography at Appalachian State University since the 90s,
She's also explored sustainability in rural Appalachia with an emphasis on food systems and access to food.
Today, she will talk about the role that food provisioning and kitchen space continues to play in creating pathways for women's leadership radicalization and community resilience.
Now, how do we change the screen to have this PowerPoint actually going? Yay. Okay. Your turn, Kathleen.
Thank you.
Thank you so much. Can people hear me? Great.
If you're a geographer in the room, go ahead and raise your hand. I like to Oh, thank you for coming. I appreciate it, y'all.
So I'm Kathleen Schroeder and I'm a professor of Geography at Appalachian State.
And I have, I'm trained as a Latin Americanist and I have spent, well, since the 1980s, working in the Andean countries primarily in Bolivia and in Peru.
But then about 30 years ago, I was hired at Appalachian State University in beautiful Boone, North Carolina.
And started really looking at issues of Appalachia as well. So one of the things that I see and one of the things I'll talk about in this talk is like the extractive relationships that you find in the Andean countries
And you also find in Appalachia. So the theoretical literature that guides me as a development scholar also applies, applies equally as well in Appalachia as it does in the Andes.
So I'm talking about food and resilience in mountain communities, and we had a pre-conference or pre-talk amongst the panelists. And I did want to just acknowledge that, of course, the word resilience is in quotes in that the term resilience is
Is contested. And the root of that issue is that You know, governments can abdicate their responsibilities to the poor if the poor characterize, and poor women in particular, as being able to solve problems without resources.
And that is clearly one of the things we see in the Andes and we see in Appalachia.
So my slides I tried to be kind of like side by side Appalachia and the Andes. And so this one is looking at kitchen space and the idea that kitchens are places where identities are created and where scrappy Appalachian women or Andean women can
provide food for people. On left hand side over, you see a mural from a farm cafe in Boone, North Carolina. And I don't know if you have something like here in Blacksburg, but it's a feed all regardless of means kind of
Venue. It's been there about 10 years. And this is a mural on the wall. It's on King Street. It's on our main street in town. And it shows this Appalachian woman farmer with this cornucopia of food and she is able to produce this you know and
Lavish it upon people. And this farm cafe is a hub. It's a center of activity. We are fortunate enough in Watauga County, North Carolina, the home of Appalachian State, to have what I would consider an intact food system.
Meaning that you have farmers and eaters and cooks all coming together often in this space.
Typically have lunch there on Fridays and at any point there'll be a, you know, a farmer will walk in you know.
The chefs of the local chefs will come in. There's a chef in residence there. So it's a space where really, you know, food is created, but also community is created.
And then on the other side of the screen. This is from a recent publication looking at COVID response to the food crisis in Peru.
So if you've been to Lima, this is out on like the outskirts of Lima and these women are putting together like a kitchen space, right? They're putting together a pot and this is a very common strategy in the Andes with regard to like in a time of crisis. So it could be Sendera Luminoso back in the 80s.
It could be COVID. It could be any number of things, but women are given small amounts of resources and they put these pots on heaters and they cook up a big bowl of soup and they either provide that for free to people or for a very nominal charge.
So this creation of space and this idea that women gain skills from working in these spaces.
So, you know, these characteristics that Appalachian women and Andean women, you know, allegedly share with regard to them being resourceful, having great networks, being plucky, hardworking.
Thrifty, all of these things can be used to abdicate the state's responsibilities to providing for the poor.
And group of students and I during COVID did a research project looking at how our local community was responding to the food crisis.
Over here, I have a slide from the Hunger and Health Coalition, which is the biggest food bank in our region.
and we looked at how women's networks provided food in all kinds of different situations. So women from this food bank.
who are longstanding members of the community network. One case I'm thinking of in particular involved the Hunger and Health Coalition represented on this slide.
Them getting a delivery of many more gallons of milk than they could reasonably get out their door within the timeframe. Milk is perishable, right?
So the woman who was in charge of the Hunger Health Coalition called up a woman at the food pantry over at the Presbyterian Church in Blowing Rock.
It used to be a very small food pantry, but the woman working there scaled up during COVID.
And she was able to send somebody over in a truck to pick up the milk and get that distributed and get that out the door.
And so as students and I were doing interviews with people, community leaders, counselors, government officials, the thing, the story that kept coming out was that, you know, people use these spaces this community space, but they also were using their social networks.
So this idea of social infrastructure being part of poor people's survival strategies you see throughout the development literature In the Andes and this publication from 2022 looks like it's almost exactly the same story as we got from Appalachia.
But set in Peru during this crisis. And you have here a a woman's face, popular kitchen that was founded and these are the places, the spaces where women come together to provide food for people.
So again, these community kitchens. So these kitchen spaces And they're like, they're more than kitchens. I think that's an important part of it. The slide on the left with women in Bolivia where I've done research for a long time.
They're standing proudly outside their community kitchen where on Thursdays they gather.
It's very nominal charge to go in there and buy your lunch but these women meet a couple hours before lunch is served and they're peeling potatoes and they're gossiping and like gossip is just… It's critically important for exchanging information.
They're also now after the lunch is served, they're doing their handcrafts. And so they are getting ready to. This was a project that was funded by USAID, so I don't think it's Anyway, so these women are putting together these handcrafts that they'll later
So a woman, one of the women on this slide is a healthcare practitioner. She's a nurse. She's trilingual. She speaks Quechua. She speaks Amara, and she speaks Spanish.
And so, you know, she's there because she's a member of the community, but she's also there so that people can ask questions. You know, if a woman is concerned about a kid being sick.
Maria's there. She can answer questions. One woman in the slide was suffering from terrible domestic abuse. And the women could work together to find a safe place for her to go.
What I'm saying is like, these are kitchens This is where food is being created, but it's also the space where women are forming these networks. And part of the argument is that these networks can help women to reach beyond the kitchen. And that's something I'm really questioning how the domestication, how this um
Creation of food and the creation of these communities like, does it really go beyond the kitchen? And what can we do to further that? On the other side of the slide, I have my token guy leader. So this is at the farm cafe there in Boone. And this is a community group that is a group of students
That they're there for like a little talk. Students are volunteering there regularly.
It was funny. I was having lunch at this place on Friday last week.
And the director told me that this space is going to hold a drag show this weekend. And they've never held a drag show before, but now on our campus, which is state institution, we can no longer have drag shows. So they're going to have a drag show.
It's going to be fine. There's going to be a lot of good organic fruits and vegetables there.
It'll be a good experience. This is a slide from Peru, and I love it because this is like when I think of community kitchens they're always like, there's like a lot of stuff, right? They're storing food. They have the pots and pans there. But the idea behind the community kitchen mantra in the development literature is that this is the place where women learn to, you know, set a budget.
Run an enterprise, negotiate prices, manage people, build their networks
And gain this confidence, like they learn to be public speakers. They learn to, you know, go out in the community.
To gather resources, write small grants. And so the idea is that, you know, does this really transfer. You know.
We've been doing this, y'all, since I started working internationally.
And I guess, you know, at this point, so we're talking about, you know, 35, 40 years at this point, you know.
You would think you would see like real women's leadership, you know, internationally in the food space and so I'm always wondering, oh, okay, where are the women? And so just like right before I'm getting ready to come up here and give this talk, I'm like, oh, let's look at the UNFAO. And let's just see, like from their screenshots.
You know, who are the women? Where are the women and uh y'all Basically, you know, we're not seeing them.
There are a few women there listed on the board. But like the big jobs still remain male-dominated.
I see that I've got just a couple minutes. I want to mention that this work is really being discussed in a serious way. Kate McLean just wrote this great book. I've got a copy of it.
Here with me. I just reviewed it for the Journal of Latin American Geography and she's talking about this sense that there are plurinational economies.
Bolivia re-founded itself as a plurinational state. And what she's saying is that this division between domestic work and work out in the community is. It doesn't represent what goes on in reality. In the old Marxist sense, like productive labor and reproductive labor,
These things are joined. And there's this sense that in the literature that when you talk about traditional women, you're talking about rural women. When you're talking about contemporary women.
They live in urban environments. And she says, in fact, this is all very fluid. And if you're going to really understand the economy in a place like Peru or Bolivia, you've got to understand that these things are intertwined.
Which brings me to this work of Maria Galindo. So this woman, y'all, is on fire. She is a radical feminist. She is just has this new book out about feminism in Bolivia.
And she identifies herself in all of the things she does, right? So I've got this long list.
She identifies herself as a cook. So when you read her work and she talks about the formation of this creative, radical feminist space, she says, well, we started this space as cooks. We started this phase like in a community. We had kids running around. We're trying to get lunch ready, but we're organizing, we're agitating.
So I just love this. You know, she's a graffiti artist. She's a radio broadcaster. She's a public lesbian, which I think is wow, you know, a loud mouth, a mouth creater.
And she started this women creating Anarchist feminist Collective. She's also a big time podcaster. Okay. And she has a very popular radio show.
All right. So what I would love to do is talk a little bit with my colleagues about this idea of cooking, you know, and is cooking radical? Can cooking be radical?
Can women leverage their dominion over kitchen space to broader social change?
And what are we seeing on the ground, particularly here in Appalachia, that is encouraging?
I am going to, I've got references and all of that.
But we can go back to that if we have time.
All right, we're on a clock, so I'm going to get going. Welcome all. Kim Niewolny here, and I'm going to engage in the entanglements in which we have the opportunity for.
And what I'm hoping to do actually is intersect with, I think one of the pieces you shared Kathleen was where are the women?
You know, I think we have an answer to that. I am not a geographer. I like geographers. You're wonderful people. I'm actually trained as a sociologist.
As well as an adult and community education. I focus on interdisciplinary food systems-based community development.
From an interdisciplinary and a critical social theory perspective. So we're going to talk about some stuff.
Just wanted to acknowledge our Center for Food Systems and Community Transformation is a space in which the work I'm going to be speaking about has but embedded within, but also lived prior to the formation of the center and we do work, we integrate from food agriculture and society
From a values-based and systems approach. So the piece I want to uplift is this ongoing project called Stories of Community Foodwork in Appalachia.
which really has been rooted in a long conversation with many, many across our region and far beyond.
to think deeply about if we're not If we are displeased with the current system in which we derive our food.
And we have questions for its possibility for difference. How do we do that work?
How do we imagine what that work is? And how do we organize?
And to me, that is integrating the role of the social imaginary, the politics of knowledge and the politics of the possible.
And that means questioning our current conditions and how we currently operate.
And I don't mean just in the production and movement of food, but where we actually engage with questioning the system.
So for us, and particularly my work, I'm very much engaged in questioning the role of where does community food work take place And how do we do that work in collaboration in partnership with those voices and who's experiences are most impacted by the system itself.
So this project has started all across our region, primarily in the mountain region of North Carolina, West Virginia, and Virginia.
And a strong interest in co-creating narratives as stories that depict the lived experiences of food and farm workers, leaders,
and organizers and they self-identify in a variety of ways in which even Kathleen has has already described in context to regional food work.
And sometimes people don't identify as those things like I'm an eater. I'm a person who lives on this planet. I care about what happens.
To myself and my neighbors. So I want to recognize the everyday lived experience of community food work.
To how to build a sense of the imaginary together means how do we co-create. And narratives in the context of narrative inquiry has been the space which I've been working and just want to just acknowledge that this work is really trying to understand
not necessarily the trying to actually counter the extractive nature, which we often see research conducting and to understand the system, we can spend loads of time critiquing. Well how do we spend our time generating possibilities and think about our epistemological and ontological spaces? And how do we focus on connectivity
and cooperation in the multi-directional ways in which we relate. So that's what this project in many ways is about.
I'm only going to highlight a very small piece of this. I'm not reading necessarily the slide. It's actually tied to one of my courses that I teach currently right now. And we have some of our students in the room and perhaps online who are actually engaged in this work as a community-based participatory research initiative.
So we can, in terms of where are the women? So this is a question I want to ask from this point. We can read for saying this.
We could read and understand our stories for this is what this person does. This is what this person does. This is how I understand my work.
But what if we read for resonance? Things that actually affect us? How do we feel and respond to the experiences in our system and our food systems from the kitchen to the field?
From the soil to our forks? And in this context, we ask questions with our co-creators to understand how do our regional food system actors perform their work in ways that extend across and are entangled with other domains of social and cultural life?
So we don't ask someone, this is really because academics are really bad at this, right? Tell me what you do. Don't know. Don't tell me what you do.
Tell me a time when you were in your community and you made impacts in a way that you felt there was value.
What does that look like? Tell me a story about that practice.
And so then we engage with these for about two hours and we have created many, many. But I want to highlight several that really share a resonance, I think, with Kathleen is sharing. These are four women.
who are the leaders in their communities across our region, who are starting in places such as the community kitchen, healthcare providers, extension professionals, every day individuals who are making food together in their gardens and in their kitchens as spaces of learning and unlearning and relearning.
And this particular person, Kim. I'm going to use first names is working as a healthcare professional and some of the emphasis of her residents focus on unity and community health.
Not extractive information we need to share. We need to share good, solid, trusted information with communities. But how we make food together so people can raise a family, have a business to move forward in their community in a way in which they see fit.
Ms. Amazada. She is a force to be reckoned with. She is a urban farmer. She's an organizer, and she is a housing development professional by training.
And she utilizes her urban spaces to bring people together from recipe to the tomatoes in which you see behind you.
And this is a space for questioning what kind of community do we want, one in which she sees as women and children most likely are impacted by the disenfranchisement of the current system.
We need to grow differently. We need to grow together.
Amanda. Amanda has since had her child. I want to recognize there's a beauty to this image that she's a planner.
She's trying to understand the connections between the entity of the state and the community distressed and she is directly engaged in those questions. She largely focuses herself. She's beyond the kitchen space in her everyday work.
But she helped create this garden space through her work and to ensure that others can continue to grow and to share food that is culturally meaningful to them.
And I also want to pay honor to DJ. DJ is a art maker.
She is a activist. She cares deeply about the violence, the physical violence in her communities.
And the ways in which we have lack of food space contributes to that violence. And so how we organize, particularly as a racial justice organizer,
to eliminate those material injustices. This kitchen space, it's all part of their story.
I don't have those stories to share with you at this moment can directly direct you to them.
But I thought most importantly was to share their piece of this story that they are here. They are organizing, they are educators, they are leaders, they are connecting their community in ways that often gets unseen.
and unheard and undervalued. But I'm also here to tell you there are far, there's also great, great organizing energy and value that's tied to their presence.
I just want to just land on the resonance that I always want to kind of share and put into the room.
as we think about resilience and food spaces. We could read for sameness. We can read how we do, but how we feel and how we want differently, I think is perhaps even more important. So as residents for community health,
Human dignity, unity. How we build a community legacy, How we build better accessibility in our spaces, Adaptability,
Economic equity, collective visioning, responsive action and conscious lifestyles.
And these are the women, I believe, who are contributing to that residence.
And with that, I think my time is up. I want to say thank you and I look forward to Danille's comments.
Good afternoon. Can you hear me, all right?
All right. I am Danille Christensen and today I'll give you kind of a quick visual survey based on ethnographic materials.
of extra domestic food preparation spaces. I'm picking up specifically in Appalachia and how these spaces and the people in them are embedded in broader social and material ecologies.
that are not necessarily gender segregated, but that help participants engage multiple kinds of power.
And I wanted to start with these images because when we think of food in Appalachia, sometimes it's these assumed deficits of isolation or subjugation, this idea of the granny woman.
cooking outside in her kettle that we see. And so I want to instead think about, instead of this deficit approach
to community flourishing of people and places. I like to think about asset-based approaches, specifically those that focus on unique human and environmental resources in an area.
And that support capacity building and self-efficacy. In terms of this region, some of the Appalachian assets that you could identify with regard to food have to do with localized knowledges.
How to find and produce food. I want to focus on social associations. And this figure of a very high social association rate in Appalachia based on the Appalachian Regional Commission Report.
is actually, as I understand it, based on membership data, and there's lots of more informal associative activity that also happens.
in the region. So this is a… So let me go.
This is a photo that was taken by Mary Hufford in the Coal River Valley at West Virginia in the mid-1990s.
In the community ramp house, which is a social meeting space In which things like ramp dinners are held for the community. These are women who are preparing these.
And she writes, historically in these mountains, female sociality has flourished around the gathering and processing of greens and other wild produce.
And this is the kind of information sharing and intimacy building that Kathleen was talking about earlier in her presentation in other kinds of kitchen spaces.
I will say that this, when we're thinking about these kinds of ecologies, the interconnections and interrelations of organisms and places.
That is challenged by other kinds of external conditions. For instance, this is Margaret Jarvis of Ennis, North Carolina, who in the mid-1970s told oral historians about the ways that as she was working in the textile factories there along the Blue Ridge.
She would manage her canning by setting a timer when she went to sleep at night so it would wake her up so that she could take the jars out of the canning kettle, right? And so there are these food practices that are happening in sort of more
Singular or isolated spaces right. But It's important to see how this kind of activity is also integrated with these other kinds of spaces. So let's think a little bit about sociality where? Where is it happening In this region?
We can think about a kitchen space as the top of a drying rack, right? This is visible to neighbors. These are beans drying on the roof of May.
Beemer's Root Cellar in Galax, Virginia. She was tired of fresh beans and decided to dry them that day. But this is also sort of a performance of self-efficacy, right? Your neighbors know that there's a surplus. So this is also kind of a public space.
Closer to the house, you have here leather breeches. These are beans in the pod that are being strung.
On the porch, right. Maybe hung to dry on the porch, again, visible and may involve other neighbors in the actual processing these beans, right? It can be done alone or in company. This is more sort of explicitly outdoor space. This is an outdoor work party in Western North Carolina that was organized by Cooperative Extension.
Agents in the mid-1920s. You can see there are portable oil stoves on which the women are doing pressure canning as well as that fire heated oversized water bath.
And then once those goods are bottled, right? You could kind of come back into the house space. This is Sadie Miller giving a tour of her pantry, kind of pantry as a place to narrate networks Who's given you what, right? To display your incompetence and your aesthetic vision, right? So there's a lot of work that are doing in these kinds of spaces, both inside and outside.
But close to home. And I want to just think about some of the kinds of power that are associated with these different spaces. Lots of kinds of power on display here.
The fiscal power of reproducing bodies by feeding. These are all ways to stretch economic power. You have the moral power of self-sufficiency.
The interactional power of organizing the work, of trading and gifting goods.
The anesthetic power of taste, sight, and smell. So look for those in these other photos that I'm going to show you.
The quote that I started with talks about female sociality. And I want to think about Gene Boydston's work about The ways that pre-industrial kinds of work were understood and recognized as all kinds of work at home or outside the home recognizes as economically important work.
And that the gender divisions were more permeable. And I think these kind of relationships often still are in effect in rural spaces, right? So everybody helps when the work needs to get done. And so I wanted to think about those more permeable kinds of ways that work happens.
We could think, for instance, about hog killings. Often still, you can see that men are often associated with killing and butchering and women often do the so-called cleanup work of rendering lard and making sausage.
But in practice, right, there's often sort of men and women that are working together to get these things done. We can think about, these are photos from the Easter farm, also close to here in Logap, North Carolina.
Here we see Josh Easter has invented and developed his own kind of apple peeler and pear.
Men are still often associated with these technological kind of innovations right here. But if you look at the ways that he and his wife Vioma talk about the food management in their house.
They're equally knowledgeable about all stages of the process, right? And you can see them interacting as well.
Another example here is Mamie and Leonard Bryan in Sparta, North Carolina.
So Leonard Bryan was a coal miner. He would often go to West Virginia to work for long stretches.
Mamie ran the farm while he was gone. And Leonard actually would plow the gardens of many of his neighbors in Allegheny County when he was in town, right? So again, a sort of fluid way that all people are involved in the work.
And then let's take a quick look at some of the ways that this kind of
permeable divisions of labor happen in more explicitly extra domestic spaces in Appalachia.
So here we have an example of a community cannery. These have been excellent in the region since around World War I. A lot of them were instituted in the late 1930s, early 1940s.
You can see Virginia still has about a dozen of these.
World War II era canneries that are still operating and there are other kind of new ventures that are also being established. Here's an example of the Callaway Community Cannery. At all the times that I've been there, it's been a very multi-generational
sort of no single gender dominating the work that's happening in these spaces, their families, their neighborhood groups.
whole hunting party came in to make a venison stew, churches, things like that.
Another one of these extra domestic kitchen spaces is the kind of club work that 4-H or home demonstration clubs that are also affiliated with USDA.
Cooperative Extension. And I wanted to end up by thinking about the ways that fundraisers also play a role in this. So I want to think about fried apple pie and apple butter making. So this is Ken Belcher and Connie Good. Ken is actually in charge of
dorms on this campus and all of their logistical sophistication and his sister Connie is an ENT, an accountant, the mother of two, a volunteer firefighter and captain of the Smith River Rescue Squad.
Donna Woolmine, Virginia. There's no local hospital in that area anymore. And so all of these emergency services are run by volunteers. And so fundraising is an extremely important part of keeping the community healthy and viable.
You can see here, these are a bunch of us. I'm also included in that making fried pies in 2022.
And you can see this is a packed kitchen space. And in recent years, it's become a much more integrated space in terms of gender and sexual In this particular this endeavor. But you can see that Connie has been managing the space for 15 years. Her organizational skills are off the charts.
They make 500 to 800 different fried pies and 1,400 quarts of apple butter.
In just a couple of days. And you can see here again that people do the work that needs to be done. So on the left, you can see that Connie's father is actually tending her granddaughter as the rest of the family and the neighborhood is involved in making those.
In terms of sort of moral power that's part of these endeavors, this is specifically apple butter, which is often a fundraiser that brings together economic power, moral power, and interactional power.
It's a lot of work, right? So you've got to get people together to pick the apples to peel and pair the apples.
You can see in wool wine, it is often the men in this case that have tended these 100-year-old cast iron apple peelers that do a lot of If you can imagine peeling 196 bushels of apples in one day, that's the work that happens, along with 100 volunteers that come and sit
And do that work. You can see some of the other kinds of work that are involved. This is a picture of the fourth generation of the Belchers who were involved in that along with their neighbors and friends.
So just to close, I wanted to go ahead and put these back on the screen to remind us about the sense of the diverse sites and participants in these food-based performances.
Of power in the region and maybe we can think about As we think about sort of what kitchen space does in terms of accessing power, we can come back to some of these kind of categories.
And then there are also ways in terms of the idea of resilience, right?
When we're talking about social ecologies like this. What do we do? What are the transitions that communities are making to manage population losses or differences in wage structures or lack of access to land on the commons. My voice is given out, which means it's time for me to end. I appreciate it. I look forward to our conversation.
So we're going to cut up your in-house discussion to 10 minutes so we can have five minutes still for anybody with questions.
Oh, well, I'll start. I learned so much from my colleagues who are trained in Appalachian studies folks, and I was struck and I'm wondering if you were too about like the similarities of both the infrastructure, you know, I'm looking at, you know, the pictures of the riddles. I'm thinking
I've seen that kettle, you know, in the Andes. So like the similarity of the infrastructure the similarity of the like the women coming together. But also, you know, going back to like my initial kind of thoughts about you know, these women are
Leaders in the community, right? Everyone acknowledges these are the women who are the leaders.
Do they ever get the jobs?
They have health insurance, you know, in a sense. And is that just to like You know, I have a degree in economics.
Proud geographer okay but like you never get that out of your head you know like the idea of like How are they paying the bills? How are they paying their taxes? And so this In a way, I don't want to oversimplify this my sense is that
Women get sold. This sense that, oh yeah, you get out there and you build your community networks and you develop your skills And you can leverage this.
You know, and I see. So few cases where the women actually have it leveraged. So that's kind of what I'm you know that's what I'm thinking about. Well, I think you can expand the conversation with community organizers generally right as a curious space that
Is working on, it may raise the margins of institutional power and precisely because it's pushing back against some of those.
That it's pushing against the hegemonic structures that are out there in many ways right so
Fruit punch. Okay. So, I mean, so that's a huge question about changing the entire infrastructure.
Yeah. And I love what you said about what unrelated to that. I just want to say it out loud so that like what you said about you know pantries being the place that narrate networks. And I'm thinking about that just being
Like, so true. You know, I'm in a very literally right you know and that's what people, I got, yeah.
I mean, just over and over and that can be in the Andes. Although like the canning tradition is not as It's not the same kind of canning tradition, but you were showing drying of beans and I could show you dryiing of potatoes you know this preservation of food
Being also a demonstration of wealth. You know, I've got so many potatoes. I'm going to draw some for, you know, the next time. So I find that really powerful.
Make sure we don't have a hot mic situation here. I just wanted to offer. This will go all the way back to how are the people being cared for as they care for others. I think that's really big frame it that way. I think it's a very relevant question and I just need to tie the both ideas together.
One of the reasons for the work that we're doing in the storytelling initiative is based on the desire by community members to, in fact, work from holler to holler.
Connect better to create these networks they are ascent. They're also powerful and they're also deliberative and deliberate and they deliberate to make those networks more possible. And so where do you create the networking And so I think I really value what you're hopefully everyone else is recognizing the everyday life in which we engage in.
From the kitchen to the garden to back to the kitchen and perhaps in the back of the truck and sharing food and preparing. So to me, it's much and I think it's what you're saying it's much larger than the ways in which we create food, but we're creating relationships in those spaces
How are we paying attention to that? Are we really paying attention to the significance and I think about that really in my work, and I think this is true for many people where you're tapped to the institution how important it is to make sure that food is part of the work.
And that is getting increasingly more difficult in institutions where we have to if you will make the case for funding to be used in ways that are incredibly foundational to the relationships that we're making.
So I just want to just, I make this case every time i write up contract and it gets increasingly more challenging. And I think this is where, to your question about How are we paying the bills? How are particularly in the gendered space? How are those less seen paying
that opportunity well maybe we can find allyship in spaces where we can continue to make those those possibilities happen?
Well, I'm just going to respond that part of when we talk about making relationships right or creating networks, part of that is creating mutual obligation right. If a network actually involves exchanges of of labor and goods um you also
engender this obligation to care, right. And I don't want to romanticize. It's like mutual aid as if it could exist outside of these other kinds of social supports that can be more guaranteed by government sources and things like that, right? But I do think that
to think about ways to make our communities stronger going forward that that another way to talk about mutual obligation is care.
So how do we create networks of care on these broader institutional levels that will enable people to get the kinds of health care that they can provide for themselves right and the money to pay for those increasingly expensive kind of interventions.
I think thinking more carefully about how to create care is an important part of that.
Just you know we all went through covid together but then last year those of us in the mountains of North Carolina went through Hurricane Helene. And it was, you know, we're still coming out of it. It was, you know, intense.
And it was like remarkable to me and maybe too convenient how quickly like these women's networks. I don't want to say co-opted but like relied upon.
You know, like we've got to get food out to the western part of the county you know, don't we know a teacher out there? Don't we so like these women's networks that are decades old you know they've been these women have been working together in the school system and the church groups
And you know aid agencies come in and like they tap into these women's resources these women's networks as ways to provide food in a crisis and like the men who have health insurance and they're driving new cars
and they're gone now. You know, and the folks who are doing the work like they're still there you know and they're going to be there and they're not going anywhere right they're proud of this work. This is impactful work, but it would be
It would be nice that they also could get a paycheck in a sense, you know, so that they can go to the store and, you know, so like I do see this reliance on these women's networks this women's ability to make stuff happen, to make the connections.
Being part of the structure you know this taking advantage of Just to put you know, probably a only one or two of you are directly interested in the Andes. But Kate McLean's book really talks about that in a direct way with regard to the state relying on these networks of informality
and that is part of the economic system. So not even like it's built in.
whether they're the Appalachian Regional Commission is like being explicit about that or not but that is part of the system. That's part of the accounting.
So. Yeah, exactly. Thank you. Yes, I was just making a note because i think that is so important It's 1:25, which means it's your turn.
I don't see any questions in the Google Doc. Did we get any in the chat or just anybody here? We have two mics we can. Larry is one of our volunteers.
I'll be a microphone runner. I know where the mic is. Noriko is the other volunteer. So there, there's two mics. Go ahead and raise your hand if you have a question or comment. Thank you so much for joining us all.
Or if we don't have any questions. The next one will be from the Zoom.
Oh, we can go with Zoom. All right.
Great to have this talk really provocative. I'm still sitting with gossip.
And I have come to learn a little bit about gossip as a community health talk.
And when we come to the question of money and paychecks.
We're talking about institutions. The provision of capacity through a social order. But gossip is, in a sense, the non-institutional realm of community health.
Talking about what's going on in the community and what can we do about it? What's wrong, what's right, who's doing which. And it gets very intimate.
But we also have those kinds of functions in the university around promotion.
And we get behind closed doors and talk about what's going on, what isn't going on, who's doing it, and the person isn't there.
There is a institutional reverence for that action. And I just, so not only is the paycheck the question.
But also just the recognition of the work of keeping community order and community health.
And you just really have pop that and I'd love to hear further thought on it.
Well, gossip is a pejorative term, right? That is meant to to frame that kind of talk and information sharing as women's talk.
And as talk that needs to be monitored and suppressed, right? So I do think it's helpful to think about it in terms of narrative information sharing, right?
So sometimes, you know, changing the terminology in which we use to speak about those things can be helpful in moving the stigma from it and acknowledging the power that it actually has and that it functions in institutions, but probably is not called gossip.
Behind the scenes talk maybe right but generically it's given a different status by giving it a different terminology.
Yeah. And so that's one of the things, I thought was really powerful when I was talking about this radical feminist Bolivian woman is like, you know, she claims it.
You know, I'm a gossip. It is powerful. You know, I am using this in my community building. And so it's, you know.
You know it's a radical take on this idea of women sharing information and asserting their power over space. I just want to always appreciate Bob's question. But I think this is a really intriguing space and I appreciate thinking about, you know, claiming and reclaiming
But I also want to just kind of broaden just from a gendered perspective and the ways in which this is also. So, I mean, we know this, but this is a class question about the ways in which people have access to knowing
And how they're reconnecting to knowing. And I think this is so much so in this work about this is a cross-gendered identities.
And it's largely those who are closest to the experience the inequity or the marginalization have networks of knowing for survival. And I think that's when I hear you say that this is how we make sense of our existence and this is how we share information
particularly in communities of color where the survival is formalized in spaces that are racialized.
And they need to be protected for people to continue to survive.
And I think that's a really, so that incidental learning, that incidental experience is really, really incredibly valuable. And it's also hard quote unquote to measure.
And give power as we look at measures of power too. And so I just want to you know just kind of put that into the space around the significance of that
And across our different identities. And as we think about I don't think I'm just, and I think we all are thinking about the ways in which we want to transform you know possibility for for well-being, for wellness for
whatever the good life is for us. So I'd like to just formally say this official session is over because it's 1.30. I know some people have to go to class or teach class. But I do want to say one of the questions online came because I think it's easier if you send us response and we can send it out to people who registered because
This is Sarah saying this has been a great panel. Thank you for exploring these topics more. Do the panelists have books or podcast recommendations they're willing to share? So I think that'd be hard to like spit it all out here, but if you all would follow up and send me that. So references on my slides.
Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah. So, okay. And the slides will be part of. Tell me if I can actually post just the PowerPoint, but it'll be on the Yeah, so I can actually take, you have references.
Hello, folks, and that's additional. Yeah, you can send me references and I will put them together and send them to people okay and then uh Yeah. And so, yeah, I do want to formally closed. You have to teach.
We have the room for another half hour. So if anybody is flexible and wants to hang out, come and have questions, have a drink or food.
We do have this space for a little bit longer. And thank you for organizing. Yeah, thank you so much.