Justice Hub with Shared Assets at the Oxford Real Farming Conference
This year’s ORFC will be running from the 4-5th January, and you can find online tickets on their website here (in person tickets are sold out).
The Justice Hub at the Oxford Real Farming Conference will be the hub for conversations about justice issues, and their relationship to food and farming. This year we’re collaborating with Shared Assets to highlight reparations and reparative systems, and will be running a series of lunchtime sessions around this theme. This year you can find the Justice Hub in The Magic Room in the Story Museum.
The Justice Hub is a dedicated space within the conference, for people who are discriminated-against or marginalised within agricultural spaces to share knowledge, feel empowered, and connect with each other. Building solidarity with international movements, the programme has expanded to encompass the exploration of intersecting issues spanning across transformational justice: land, race, food, class, climate, reparations, abolition, disability, health, gender, wealth, and migration.
Seeding Reparations and Shared Assets, as hosts of the Justice Hub, invite people to speak from marginal perspectives, whilst centring their topics on a belief in equity, solidarity and collaboration. We welcome all allies to come and share the space, and hope that holding this space will contribute to building a diverse and equitable movement around food sovereignty and land justice.
This year’s Justice Hub will have a focus on the issue of reparations across several panel discussions and workshops. We aim to shine a light on the work that is currently happening in the UK around reparative justice with a particular emphasis on land and food systems.
Sessions will include: Land as reparations and how to get there with Katherine Wall, Repairing the Land: an enquiry into ecological, cultural and social repair with Rachel Solnick and Diasporic Black and Brown Communities: Land, Belonging, Representation and Social Justice with Black and Green Futures, Mikaela Loach and Claire Ratinon – as well as two lunchtime networking sessions, for those doing work or research on reparative justice, led by Seeding Reparations.
Find the full ORFC programme here.
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Justice Hub Programme
Thursday 4th January
11am-12.30pm: LAND AS REPARATIONS AND HOW TO GET THERE Story Museum, The Woodshed
Speakers: Katherine Wall, Miriam Rose, Esther Stanford-Xosei, Andre Kpodonu; Chair: Naomi Terry
The accumulation of land and wealth in Britain was made possible through the colonisation of peoples and lands across the globe; through the profits generated through enslavement; and through the creation of an economic system that was built on exploitation, violence and extraction. Land as reparations to communities who are directly affected by these systems and their fallout is one way repair can be attempted and healing and transformation towards something better made possible. This session will explore the demands for land as reparations and the strategies that might bring it into being.
1-1.45pm: SEEDING REPARATIONS NETWORKING Story Museum, The Magic Common Room
Facilitators: Olive Ceesay, Andre Kpodonu, Tom Wakeford
Seeding Reparations will host lunchtime organising sessions for conference attendees already engaged in Reparations and/or anti-colonial work. This session is not an introduction, but a space for organisers to collaborate on setting the agenda and generating questions about existing efforts and better connecting them. On day one, participants will reflect and process their involvement in Reparations work in racial affinity groups to prepare for a multiracial coalition space on day two. Lunchtime sessions will be divided into two spaces: one for BIPOC participants and another for white participants.
2-3.30pm: WORKSHOP: NO BORDERS IN LAND AND FOOD JUSTICE Story Museum, The Magic Common Room
Facilitators: Nicki J Carter, Mona Bani
A workshop that aims to bring a No Borders analysis into the food/land justice movement space. A space to explore how the border regime operates to uphold colonial relations to land, deny people access to land and underpin an exploitative food system. Among other things, our workshop will explore the deep-rooted links between land justice and no borders struggles, and hold space to discuss how growers, farmers and land-justice organisers can show up for people with lived experience of border violence.
4-5.30pm: REPAIRING THE LAND: AN ENQUIRY INTO ECOLOGICAL, CULTURAL AND SOCIAL REPAIR Story Museum, The Magic Common Room
Speakers: Rachel Solnick, Claire Ratinon, Loa Niumeitolu
How do we heal the wounds of colonial history? Oppression and harm continue to make and shape the world we share. This session explores ongoing work towards repair and asks what still needs to be done. This is bigger than a conversation about financial debt which is often the focus of reparations inquiry. But what constitutes repair and reclamation? What is the place of land workers in that conversation? What are the land stories that continue to bring hope and struggle against racial capitalism?
6-7.30pm: DIASPORIC BLACK AND BROWN COMMUNITIES: LAND, BELONGING, REPRESENTATION AND SOCIAL JUSTICE Story Museum, The Woodshed
Speakers: Mikaela Loach, Claire Ratinon, Carlos Ayala, Elsie Harp; Chair: Rosina Al-Shaater, Miss Divine
This is not a traditional panel and is run as a podcast discussion. It will explore, honour and celebrate experiences, wisdom and intergenerational practices of Black and Brown people in relation to land justice and presence in the environmental scene. The discussion will reflect on areas such as: professional and personal experiences, intersectionality of marginalisation/exclusion across different backgrounds, identities and abilities; access to land and opportunities working with land; nature connection; heritage and genetic memory. We will also explore ideas around the sense of “belonging” and “ownership” of land. Speakers will provide varied, (un) conventional perspectives from different professions linked to land i.e. farmers, herbalists, creatives,
Friday 5th January
9-10.30am: WORKSHOP: SHARING OUR LAND STORIES AND LINEAGES Story Museum, The Magic Common Room
Facilitators: Sara Moon, Lucy Michaels, Rachel Solnick, Samson Hart
Many of us have complex relationships with land, especially those of us with diasporic identities and histories of displacement. How might a deeper understanding of our land lineages help us find belonging, connection, accountability and healing? In this workshop, we will invite participants to inquire into their relationship with the lands they live in and the lands their ancestors came from, hoping to open up a deeper dialogue and conversation about what land justice might look like in light of such complex identities and histories. This workshop is being held from a jewish diasporist and coliberatory perspective, by facilitators of mixed jewish heritages. It is adapted to a UK context from the work of Linke Fligl, a US-based queer jewish diasporist chicken farm and cultural organising project. This workshop is open to everyone, and we really welcome participation from people with diverse land, migration and immigrant stories.
11am-12.30pm: SOLIDARITY ACROSS LAND TRADES (SALT): KNOW YOUR WORKERS’ RIGHTS Story Museum, The Magic Common Room
Speakers: Mill Dessent, Nell Benney, Claire Ratinon
A short session focused on demystifying employment rights for land workers, employees, trainees, apprentices, and volunteers. We’ll be explaining minimum wage law, rights for volunteers, accommodation standards and requesting reasonable adjustments, amongst other issues. Run by grassroots trade union Solidarity Across Land Trades (SALT), affiliated with the Bakers and Allied Food Workers. This session is for non-management staff only.
1-1.45pm: SEEDING REPARATIONS NETWORKING Story Museum, The Magic Common Room
Facilitators: Olive Ceesay, Andre Kpodonu, Tom Wakeford
Seeding Reparations will be hosting lunchtime organising sessions for those attending the conference who are already working on Reparations and/ or through an anti-colonial lens. This lunchtime session on day two, invites participants into a coalition space where discussions of the wider movement can be explored. Taking stock of how we are approaching reparative justice, we will take this opportunity to build relationships, draw connections between our strategies and consider how we can coordinate an intersectional and reparative movement of many movements.
1-1.45: EXHIBITION: ROOTING DIASPORISM ILLUSTRATIONS Story Museum, The Triangle Room
Rachel Solnick
A series of illustrations created as part of ethnographic field work on Detroit’s Urban Farms. Featuring portraits of farmers alongside quotes from conversations and interviews this exhibition centres the voices of BIPOC and Jewish farmers working to reclaim cultural identity and cultivate decolonial land practices. It is a celebration particularly of the incredible Black food sovereignty movement in the city which is nurturing abolition, liberation, and self-determination.
2-3.30pm: WORKSHOP: ANTI-OPPRESSION NATURE WRITING Story Museum, The Magic Common Room
Facilitators: Liba Ravindran, Loa Niuleitolu
Workshop spaces are limited and require sign-up in the Main Hall. The Anti-Oppression Circle is a network created and organised over the last three years. Its purpose is to hold space for those most marginalised in our society to have honest and transparent discussions around various topics related to systemic change and dismantling systems of oppression. Through this writing workshop, we will explore poetry from different cultures and contexts that is speaking to this purpose to help us apply the practices ourselves. We will share, reflect and build empathy around poetic expressions of land and food justice and how we can organise going forwards to shift the narrative of our current systems.