3/19/25

1pm

Sage 5711

A grand land transition is underway again, here in the Mahicannituck estuary. After 400 years of settler colonial reterritorialization, the cities, villages, and farm fields along the Hudson River bear the evidence of many such transitions. Successive waves of accumulation, crisis, and abandonment have created regional geographies ripe for remaking in the image of capital. The dairy industry’s collapse and the prison industry’s subsequent boom is a compelling recent example. When the COVID-19 pandemic forced an exodus from New York City, long simmering urban and rural gentrification along the scenic river reached a full boil, driving the affordability of housing and land out of reach for farmers, farm workers, nurses, baristas, firefighters and correctional officers alike. The dominant regional development agendas of the last fifteen years are insufficient to respond. Fed by state and federal tax incentives or direct investment, these development agendas have focused on downtown revitalization, waterfront activation, and rural tourism, including boosterism for the region's iconic small farms and agrarian landscapes. For stewards of land and food, this booming investment in an “agrarian sense of place” may prove to be a pyrrhic victory. Meanwhile, aging infrastructure and housing stock demand significant investment. What are the politics of place and belonging that can meet this moment? Drawing on over 10 years of organizing and scholarship at the intersections of struggles over food, housing, and incarceration in New York, this research presentation mobilizes the concept of “abolition geography” (Gilmore 2023) as an antidote to agendas structured in agrarian innocence.

Dr. Sara Thomas Black is a geographer, organizer, and adjunct lecturer in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Sara completed her PhD in Geography at The University of Georgia, where her research in critical food studies, Black geographies, carceral geographies, and urban political ecology was funded by the National Science Foundation. Her scholarly work is rooted in years of study and practice with multi-racial, multi-generational, and grassroots movements for food and climate justice, including over a decade of work with the Freedom Food Alliance, a network of New York farmers and organizers using food and farmland as organizing tools for prison abolition.