Back to the Roots

SARA SHOSTAK is an associate professor at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, where she teaches in the Department of Sociology and the Health: Science, Society and Policy Program.

"A timely, creative, and comprehensive portrait of urban farming that offers a vivid and theoretically sophisticated account of how memory and meaning making shape cities. This is a must-read for those interested in urban agriculture, as well as those who care about memory, culture, and place." - Japonica Brown-Saracino (author of How Places Make Us: Novel LBQ Identities in Four Small Cities) "Back to the Roots lays bare the simultaneous and contradictory pull of love, community, tenacity, inequity, frustration, and hope that propels urban agriculture, as well as the critical need for greater accountability, inclusion, and equity." - Laura Lawson (author of City Bountiful: A Century of Community Gardening in America) "Drawing on their narratives, Back to the Roots demonstrates that urban agriculture is a critical domain for explorations of, and challenges to, the long standing inequalities that shape both the materiality of cities and the bodies of their inhabitants."(American Sociological Association - Environmental Sociology News) "Author: Health equity and racial justice grow alongside the vegetables at Massachusetts urban farms" by Carrie Healy (New England Public Media)

• Introduction1 Cultivating the Commonwealth2 The Powers of Food3 Lineages and Land4 Stories of the Soil5 Urban FuturesConclusionEpilogueAppendix A: Into the Field: Data and MethodsAppendix B: Research and ReflexivityAcknowledgmentsNotesReferencesIndex