Bard College Hosts Third Annual Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck Conference on Food & Memory, March 6–8
Clockwise from top left: Lucy Grignon, Ancient Roots Homestead (photo by Thatcher Keats); Vivien Sansour, founder and director of the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library (photo by Samar Hazboun); Misty Cook, author of Medicine Generations, Natural Native American Medicines Traditional to the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohicans Indian Tribe; Jalal Sabur, cofounder of Freedom Food Alliance and Sweet Freedom Farm.
Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck, a Mellon Foundation Humanities for All Times initiative, hosts its final annual conference from March 6 through 8, at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Centered around the theme of the Rethinking Place project’s third year, the conference, “Food & Memory,” will aim to explore food systems, agricultural practices, and culinary histories as a point of entry into place-making past, present, and future.
The two prior Rethinking Place conferences, “The DRE: Disturbance, Re-Animation, and Emergent Archives” and “Refusal, Creation, and Intersectionality,” focused on emergent and disruptive archives and on Indigenous research methods, and engaged themes that continue to apply to “Food & Memory.” Our complex food systems and their many human and non-human players—recipes and seeds, plants and care—can be seen as living archives, locations of research, and sites of knowledge production.
From March 6 through 8, Rethinking Place hosts a multidisciplinary gathering to interrogate questions of food and memory, building on 24 months of work in adjacent areas. This conference brings together agricultural workers including Jalal Sabur of Sweet Freedom Farm and Kenny Perkins (Mohawk) of the Akwesasne Seed Hub, chefs including Farah Momen, food systems scholars including Ozoz Sokoh, and artists, notably Vivien Sansour and Marie Watt (Turtle Clan of the Seneca Nation of Indians), to create fertile ground for interdisciplinary discussion.
On Thursday, March 6, Lucille Grignon (Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican) gives her opening keynote address, titled “In the Kitchen with Our Ancestors,” followed by a presentation by Marie Watt, a community meal with Ozoz Sokoh and BEM Brooklyn, celebrating the release of her new Nigerian cookbook, Chop Chop. A simultaneous exhibition in the Bard Stevenson Library features former Architecture Program Fellow Stephanie Kyuyoung Lee’s work, “Hard Labor, Soft Space: The Making of Radical Farms,” made while in residence at Bard College.
On Friday, March 7, the day’s events feature chef Farah Momen’s talk “Taste the Revolution: The Evolution of Bengali Food Culture,” farmer Jalal Sabur’s workshop “Grow Food Not Prisons: Building a movement towards Liberation and Justice,” and several other concurrent workshops include a medicine walk with Misty Cook (Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican), place-based research and zine making, jam making at Montgomery Place Kitchens, and presentations by Rethinking Place Food & Memory Fellows Sage Liotta ’25 and Tatiana Blackhorse ’27. A Stone Soup Community Dinner and Storytelling, cohosted by the Bard Farm, Fisher Center Anti-Racism Working Group, and Experimental Humanities concludes the day.
On Saturday, March 8, Kenny Perkins of Akwesasne Seed Hub gives the closing keynote address, followed by Choy Common’s talk “Growing Interdependence—Building a Food Sovereignty Cooperative Within and Against Industrial Food Systems,” workshops on student organizing for food justice and building land-based solidarity networks, and the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library Traveling Kitchen.
Find the full conference schedule and workshop descriptions here. The conference is free, registration required here.
“We are honored to benefit from the generosity and wisdom of individuals who have long engaged in the hard work of nurturing and defending the flora and fauna vital to a balanced world,” says Christian Ayne Crouch, principal investigator of Rethinking Place and director of the Center for Indigenous Studies at Bard College. “I can think of no better way, on the cusp of spring and a new growing season, to conclude this grant celebrating deep local learning and myriad forms of intellectual and community engagement.”
We are pleased to have joined our efforts in place-based inquiry with other entities on the Bard campus. For their support over the life of the Rethinking Place project, we thank the Bard Farm, the Center for Environmental Science and Humanities, the Center for Experimental Humanities, the Center for Human Rights and the Arts, and the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. Rethinking Place would also like to extend gratitude to our supporting partners at Center for Indigenous Studies, American and Indigenous Studies, the Fisher Center Anti-Racism Working Group on Food, BEM Brooklyn, Forge Project, Sweet Freedom Farm, and the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library. “Food & Memory” is the final conference of the “Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck” project grant period.
Post Date: 02-04-2025
The two prior Rethinking Place conferences, “The DRE: Disturbance, Re-Animation, and Emergent Archives” and “Refusal, Creation, and Intersectionality,” focused on emergent and disruptive archives and on Indigenous research methods, and engaged themes that continue to apply to “Food & Memory.” Our complex food systems and their many human and non-human players—recipes and seeds, plants and care—can be seen as living archives, locations of research, and sites of knowledge production.
From March 6 through 8, Rethinking Place hosts a multidisciplinary gathering to interrogate questions of food and memory, building on 24 months of work in adjacent areas. This conference brings together agricultural workers including Jalal Sabur of Sweet Freedom Farm and Kenny Perkins (Mohawk) of the Akwesasne Seed Hub, chefs including Farah Momen, food systems scholars including Ozoz Sokoh, and artists, notably Vivien Sansour and Marie Watt (Turtle Clan of the Seneca Nation of Indians), to create fertile ground for interdisciplinary discussion.
On Thursday, March 6, Lucille Grignon (Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican) gives her opening keynote address, titled “In the Kitchen with Our Ancestors,” followed by a presentation by Marie Watt, a community meal with Ozoz Sokoh and BEM Brooklyn, celebrating the release of her new Nigerian cookbook, Chop Chop. A simultaneous exhibition in the Bard Stevenson Library features former Architecture Program Fellow Stephanie Kyuyoung Lee’s work, “Hard Labor, Soft Space: The Making of Radical Farms,” made while in residence at Bard College.
On Friday, March 7, the day’s events feature chef Farah Momen’s talk “Taste the Revolution: The Evolution of Bengali Food Culture,” farmer Jalal Sabur’s workshop “Grow Food Not Prisons: Building a movement towards Liberation and Justice,” and several other concurrent workshops include a medicine walk with Misty Cook (Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican), place-based research and zine making, jam making at Montgomery Place Kitchens, and presentations by Rethinking Place Food & Memory Fellows Sage Liotta ’25 and Tatiana Blackhorse ’27. A Stone Soup Community Dinner and Storytelling, cohosted by the Bard Farm, Fisher Center Anti-Racism Working Group, and Experimental Humanities concludes the day.
On Saturday, March 8, Kenny Perkins of Akwesasne Seed Hub gives the closing keynote address, followed by Choy Common’s talk “Growing Interdependence—Building a Food Sovereignty Cooperative Within and Against Industrial Food Systems,” workshops on student organizing for food justice and building land-based solidarity networks, and the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library Traveling Kitchen.
Find the full conference schedule and workshop descriptions here. The conference is free, registration required here.
“We are honored to benefit from the generosity and wisdom of individuals who have long engaged in the hard work of nurturing and defending the flora and fauna vital to a balanced world,” says Christian Ayne Crouch, principal investigator of Rethinking Place and director of the Center for Indigenous Studies at Bard College. “I can think of no better way, on the cusp of spring and a new growing season, to conclude this grant celebrating deep local learning and myriad forms of intellectual and community engagement.”
We are pleased to have joined our efforts in place-based inquiry with other entities on the Bard campus. For their support over the life of the Rethinking Place project, we thank the Bard Farm, the Center for Environmental Science and Humanities, the Center for Experimental Humanities, the Center for Human Rights and the Arts, and the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. Rethinking Place would also like to extend gratitude to our supporting partners at Center for Indigenous Studies, American and Indigenous Studies, the Fisher Center Anti-Racism Working Group on Food, BEM Brooklyn, Forge Project, Sweet Freedom Farm, and the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library. “Food & Memory” is the final conference of the “Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck” project grant period.
Post Date: 02-04-2025