Already in America: Transnational homemaking among Liberian refugees

This article explores how refugees at the Buduburam Liberian refugee settlement in Ghana constructed and imagined home in and through a place they have never been to- America. Drawing on ethnographic examples of homemaking at Buduburam, this article develops the concept of entanglement to show how preferences for and access to the three durable solutions of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees were influenced by centuries of transnational homemaking embedded in the histories of the transatlantic slave trade and colonization of Liberia.Refugees preferred and practised resettlement not as a final destination, but as an active form of transnationalism.The reconfiguration of homemaking through the lens of entanglement demonstrates the importance of developing migratory policies and practices that are attentive to historic and future forms of inequality

The right to taste: Conceptualizing the nourishing potential of school lunch

The National School Lunch Program (NLSP) draws on federal poverty guidelines to distribute free, reduced, and full price meals to students throughout the United States. The NSLP aims to provide nutritious meals to students in need, and in 2014, the Community Eligibility Provision expanded food entitlements, allowing high poverty districts to serve all meals free. This study analyzes pilot ethnographic research conducted in an urban elementary school and draws on three dimensions of nourishment to consider the impact of school meals. Failure to understand how the filling, invigorating, and gratifying dimensions of nourishment engage and contradict one another diminishes the overall impact of school food entitlements. Drawing on the NSLP “offer vs serve” model, this article presents the right to taste as a conceptual platform for obtaining all dimensions of nourishment

Taste and displacement

Anthropologists have engaged deeply with questions of food on the move, from the nutritional mechanics of how diets change to the social and cultural dimensions of identity, belonging, and loss that unfold through human migration. Studies of food and taste among displaced populations typically focus on the dual loss of meaning and place, but this chapter draws on ethnographic research in a Liberian refugee settlement to show how taste and place - as nature, landscape, and socio-political boundary - matter in constituting refugee identities, experiences, and aspirational futures. While people and foods on the move become targets of discrimination and dehumanization, taste also emerges as a central way of engaging, shaping, and navigating displacement

Already in America: Transnational homemaking among Liberian refugees

This article explores how refugees at the Buduburam Liberian refugee settlement in Ghana constructed and imagined home in and through a place they have never been to- America. Drawing on ethnographic examples of homemaking at Buduburam, this article develops the concept of entanglement to show how preferences for and access to the three durable solutions of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees were influenced by centuries of transnational homemaking embedded in the histories of the transatlantic slave trade and colonization of Liberia.Refugees preferred and practised resettlement not as a final destination, but as an active form of transnationalism.The reconfiguration of homemaking through the lens of entanglement demonstrates the importance of developing migratory policies and practices that are attentive to historic and future forms of inequality

Already in America: Transnational homemaking among Liberian refugees

This article explores how refugees at the Buduburam Liberian refugee settlement in Ghana constructed and imagined home in and through a place they have never been to- America. Drawing on ethnographic examples of homemaking at Buduburam, this article develops the concept of entanglement to show how preferences for and access to the three durable solutions of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees were influenced by centuries of transnational homemaking embedded in the histories of the transatlantic slave trade and colonization of Liberia.Refugees preferred and practised resettlement not as a final destination, but as an active form of transnationalism.The reconfiguration of homemaking through the lens of entanglement demonstrates the importance of developing migratory policies and practices that are attentive to historic and future forms of inequality

Performing Vegetable Nutrition: Rethinking School Food and Health

School food programs across the United States are plagued by widespread criticism and face urgent calls for reform and public discourse has also become fixated upon “healthy” eating as a means to address a variety of child health problems. Scholars widely challenge the admonishment to eat “healthy” as laden with privilege and recognize the inherent, hegemonic whiteness of contemporary alternative food movements, but few studies have directly examined the relationship between race and school food programs. This paper draws on ethnographic research to unpack “healthy eating” through the perspective of elementary school students and shows how they challenge dominant narratives that assume kids do not like vegetables and expose the fallacy of nutrition education as the key to healthy eating. Through the performance of vegetable nutrition, kids critically engage with normative nutrition messages and begin to reveal a racialized consciousness of school food