SAFN is pleased to announce that the 2025 SAFN Student Research Award winner is Mandy Muise. Muise is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Their work centers around food sovereignty movements and urban agriculture networks. Drawing from the traditions of collaborative ethnographies (Kennemore and Postero 2020) and feminist activist ethnographies (Craven and Davis 2013), their study partners with community members and organizations that are already engaged in the work of food justice.
Muise’s project is a study of community markets in Nashville, Tennessee. The summer of 2025 has seen the inaugural season of two community markets in south Nashville–– the Growing Together Market (GTM), organized by the Nashville Food Project, as well as the Flatrock Market (FM), organized by Cosecha Community Development. These two markets are intended to provide direct interventions to what is commonly understood as south Nashville’s food desert. Rejecting this desertification of vibrant spaces, this research instead characterizes south Nashville as a place experiencing urban food apartheid. Bringing attention to the systemic nature of food inaccessibility for lower-income areas of Nashville, Muise’s research interrogates the relationship between these desert-ified areas and the people who live within them. Resisting these conceptions of agricultural and social death, residents of South Nashville are increasingly turning to community gardens, shared plots of land, and other forms of urban agriculture to supplement food access in these spaces. Exploring these refusals of insecurity, the research follows the trajectory of both the GTM and the FM in their first market season, as both organizations seek to bridge the gap between local farmers and local consumers by bringing markets into south Nashville. Both the GTM and the FM are engaged in larger conversations around food sovereignty in Nashville, as they seek a wider inclusion of Nashville-based farmers in commercial markets.
These are not new movements toward self and community subsistence; these efforts are grounded in the land and history of Nashville. The FM is primarily concerned with the inclusion of Latine/x individuals in Nashville; the GTM directly supports farmers from Burma and Bhutan that came to the U.S. with refugee status. Muise’s preliminary fieldwork in Southeast Nashville highlighted that practices of cultivation-for-survival and supplemental cultivation, as seen through urban agriculture, are shared across low-income residents of Nashville, including Black residents, Latin American immigrants, and immigrants with refugee status from South and Southeast Asia. With the incorporation of new racial and ethnic communities into the farming landscape of Nashville has come new permutations of cultivation; the growth of jicama and daikon radishes accompany the okra and yams traditionally found within Black food cultures, thus bringing new life into the shared landscape.
South Nashville has been heavily targeted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids. In addition to bridging gaps in food access that are a result of histories of redlining and segregation, residents of south Nashville are facing threats to themselves, to their families, and to their neighbors. In a moment where individuals with vulnerable status are afraid to leave their homes, this research asks what work can a community market do to reinforce a vision of community, an ethic of care? In the wake of such extreme violence, with persistent threats of more raids, how do communities continue to support each other through localized food systems and networks of support?
Heeding community activists’ uplifting of community gardening and urban agriculture as a route to a Black/Brown futurity, Muise’s research takes seriously the project of urban agriculture as a means of transformation, re-envisioning the food landscape in pursuit of a more equitable world. Drawing upon Black Geographies (McKittrick 2006; McKittrick and Woods 2007) and Black Food Geographies (Jones 2019; Reese 2019) to examine how community gardening practices and local markets are indicative of collective agency and community resistances, the project explores community markets as relational spaces, investigating how organizers conceive of these spaces in tandem with multiracial coalition-making. The research pursues the following questions: How do food injustice and food sovereignty efforts serve as a common point around which to organize? How do immigrant and refugee communities navigate their place in the agricultural landscape of the American Southeast? How does their positioning as non-Black people of color complicate processes of belonging and becoming? Working alongside food sovereignty and food justice movements that are expansive rather than exclusive of Burmese and Bhutanese refugees and migrants, anthropological research can begin to unravel how non-Black people of color are racialized and understood within the American Southeast in relation to local food geographies.