Seeds That We Keep: Grounding Seedkeeping Praxis for Growing Black Food Futures in the Mid-Atlantic

Reform within food justice initiatives calls for emergent strategies and practices that align with pursuits of justice, health equity, ecological sustainability, and collective social change. Examining historical and contemporary Black geographies of the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States offers valuable lessons on what grows and thrives in opposition to plantation logic. As both material and immaterial representations of the genesis of life, seeds serve as catalysts for understanding stories of praxis, where seedkeeping traditions and contemporary experiences radically reimagine and contest the imposition of colonial legacies. Theoretically grounded in Black feminist futurities, this research illuminated the relationship between radical tradition and radical imagination to understand the complex landscapes of Black liberation through stories of past, present, and future relationships to seeds. The everyday stories from Black seedkeepers articulate visions for equitable food systems and provide specific insights into how a seedkeeping praxis manifests and forms of community cultural wealth and self-determination that challenge the ongoing commodification of seeds. Focusing on the Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. where these geographies are deeply shaped by colonial sites with legacies of slavery, land theft, and a genesis of American agriculture that created the foundation for global capitalism, this project delved into the narratives of 17 Black seedkeepers from. By engaging with seedkeepers' memories and motivations this inquiry also lays the foundation for understanding how narratives articulate collective hopes for food sovereignty through seeds.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science in Life Sciences

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Agricultural and Extension Education

Department dc:contributor.department

Agricultural, Leadership, and Community Education

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Madden, Justice Makynzee

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Niewolny, Kimberly L.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Archibald, Thomas G.
• Baldwin, Andrea N.

• Black futures
• Black radical imagination
• Black seedkeeping
• Black geographies
• Black ecologies
• seed sovereignty
• self-reliance
• narrative inquiry
• praxis

Statement dc:rights

• Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en

Dc Identifier Other

vt_gsexam:41478

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/123733