Exploring Reparative Methodologies in the U.S. South

Long histories of colonial violence (Woods, 2017) and plantation logic (McKittrick,2017) still haunt Mississippi lands, impacting present-day realities for Black and Indigenous people who are fighting for food sovereignty. While overt violence is no longer the dominant means of control, new forms of plantation logic have emerged to maintain the status quo. Thus, territorial violence continues through land use policy, racial planning processes, and unjust development practices. In this context, the Center for Mississippi Food Systems and Choctaw Fresh Produce, partnered with Cornell University to engage in an experimental workshop on reparative methodologies. Through community partnerships and collective study, we ask what is the role of planners in facilitating territorial reparations?

In a community of co-teachers, co-knowledge producers, and co-learners, we engage in critical urban pedagogy, as understood by Ortiz and Millan (2022). We contextualize current food struggles to colonial histories, understanding they ways food has been used for oppression and as a means of freedom. We apply theories and practices of reparations to the food systems context in Mississippi and develop reparative methodologies rooted in local knowledges. Learning from these local histories, we build a reparative framework that identifies theories, skills, and practices that planners can use to facilitate territorial healing (Ortiz and Gomez-Cordoba, 2024). We argue that reparations can only be realized through worldbuilding that makes place otherwise.

References

Ortiz, C., & Gómez Córdoba, O. (2024). Territorial healing: A spatial spiral weaving transformative reparation. Planning Theory, 23(2), 110-130.

Ortiz, C., & Millan, G. (2022). Critical urban pedagogy: Convites as sites of southern urbanism, solidarity construction and urban learning. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 46(5), 822-844.

McKittrick, K. (2013). Plantation futures. Small axe: A caribbean journal of criticism, 17(3 (42)), 1-15.

Woods, C. (2017). Development arrested: The blues and plantation power in the Mississippi Delta. Verso Books.