Sowing Abolition: Reimagining Agricultural Education in the Afterlife of Slavery

Educational practices around agriculture and food must reckon with the enduring legacy of slavery and racial oppression in the food system. This manuscript explores how agricultural and food-based education can be taught with the legacy of slavery in mind and envisions what an abolitionist agricultural education might entail. Blending scholarly analysis with an activist orientation, I draw on critical race theory, food justice scholarship, and decolonial thought to argue that teaching food and farming cannot be taught independently from historical and ongoing structures of anti-Black racism and colonialism. Key thinkers such as Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, Frank Wilderson, Frantz Fanon, and Walter Rodney provide a theoretical framework for understanding how Black experiences, knowledge, and struggles inform a transformative pedagogy. I articulate an abolitionist agricultural education as one that centers Black and Indigenous epistemologies, addresses the afterlife of slavery in contemporary food injustice, and engages youth in civic action through school-based and community gardening.