Sustaining

These days when we hear the term sustaining, we typically think of the environment and the science of climate change. Rates of carbon emissions; renewable energy; food scarcity; pollution, etc. are the variables that come to mind.  But how people from diverse populations and from different countries come together to sustain the environment and their social worlds is the cultural-sociological approach missing in the sustainability equation above.  Professor of Sociology Pierrette Hongadneu-Sotelo has been studying, thinking, and writing about the relationship between migration and food systems for the past several years. “How we all engage with soil, plants, and water,” writes Hongadneu-Sotelo, “will determine the ecological viability of the planet.” And urban gardens, she has found, are the laboratories where the sustaining of nature and community intersect.  Professor Hongadneu-Sotelo will discuss her creative thinking processes in her research, which offer us another model of a polymathic practice that illuminates the interconnectedness of global concerns of such magnitude as climate change and migration.