Robert Gottlieb opened his talk on Wednesday, April 5 with a quote by Margaret Thatcher: “To be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing.”
Gottlieb, emeritus professor of urban and environmental policy at Occidental College, delivered a talk at the Argue Auditorium at Pomona College about his research on the framework of care-centered politics and how it can be used to restructure and transform the food system. The talk served as the second in the Philip Rundel Speaker Series within the Pomona College Program of Environmental Analysis.
Gottlieb focuses his research on environmental and food justice, care politics and power and inequality. Gottlieb is the author of numerous books, including “Care Centered Politics: From Home to the Planet,” which was published in 2022.
Professor Guillermo Douglass-Jaimes, assistant professor of environmental analysis at Pomona, coordinated the talk in response to student interests in food justice and care work.
“I shared some of this with a colleague of mine from Occidental College who shared that Gottlieb had a new book out that seemed like a good fit, so she made the introduction, and I invited him to give a talk on our campus,” Douglass-Jaimes said.
Furthermore, Gottlieb pointed out that his inspiration to become involved in food justice work is its ability to interweave social movements.
“Food justice is an extension of, is connected to and influences environmental justice,” said Gottlieb. “I was trying to find ways in which social movements could intersect and build capacity and … search for transformation.”
“I found Gottlieb’s connection between environmental justice and food justice interesting since activism and discourse around those topics have been separate,” Jacob Greene PO ‘23, an attendee, said.
Gottlieb conceives of the framework of food justice to examine the holistic process of the food system.
“It looks at food and the way it’s been organized through the entire process from the growing, manufacturing, marketing, selling and ultimately the disposal of food,” Gottlieb said. “[I]t looks at how and where we consume food, why we consume what we eat and how we dispose of it.”
Notably, Gottlieb mentioned that dialogue around food justice wasn’t widely shared until just a few years ago, yet it is an intersectional conversation in nature, as it encapsulates a large breadth of social issues.
“I found Gottlieb’s connection between environmental justice and food justice interesting since activism and discourse around those topics have been separate.”
“When we think about food justice, questions of labor, health, environment and immigrant rights are raised,” Gottlieb said.
A noteworthy takeaway from Gottlieb’s talk was the significance of using a care-centered approach towards issues of food justice.
“The care politics perspective is a language of healing, transformation and distribution,” Gottlieb said.
The language of care aims to redefine how we look at work and labor, race, gender issues, economics and immigrant rights in the context of the food system and beyond.
For Greene, the most resonant points in Gottlieb’s speech were ways in which we can consider a care-centered approach to think about numerous social issues today.
“I appreciated that he applied the care-centered politics lens to pressing and interconnected social issues,” Greene said.
Gottlieb noted that health system dialogue reformation is closely related to care politics of challenging existing narratives.
“One of the things I argue in my book is a call for medicare, or a single-payer system,” Gottlieb said. “It’s a way to think about health not in market terms but rather in terms of who can afford a level of care.”
In a similar sense, Gottlieb explained how we can also use this care-centered perspective to reimagine policing, particularly in a post-pandemic context.
“If they’re going to be cops, maybe they should be defined differently in terms of the work that they do, and how they connect with the community, so that they stay within this care framework,” Gottlieb said.
Gottlieb also brought to light a significant objective of care politics, which involves rethinking reparations, to something not as an act of charity but as social transformation of redistribution for marginalized communities.
“Gottlieb’s talk highlighted often overlooked and undervalued care work that has always been done throughout our society and the need to value this work,” Douglass-Jaimes said.
“[C]are politics is an equal, mutualistic relationship that argues for caring with,” Gottlieb said. “The idea of care leads to action and a sense of possibility in the midst of an anti-care world.”