Protest pizzas

Resisting carcerality with storytelling, community building, and an array of toppings

Abstract

How and when can pizza be a protest? The potentials of food-in-action for cultural resurgence and community building amongst criminalized peoples are significant. That being said, attention to the ways carceral logics divide and isolate us is needed to avoid romanticizing food-based research and programming and perpetuating harmful power structures within and beyond prison walls. In a nutshell, activist research in and against carceral contexts is complicated, and adding food can make it even messier. Thankfully, getting our hands dirty and later cleaning up together after are important processes across food justice contexts. Based around a recent pizza party held as part of my ongoing doctoral Participatory Action Research, these notes from the field (or, in this case, the community kitchen) will trace the complexities of community building through cooking circles. I will share possibilities of sharing food as a radical act and the sticky parts of anti-carceral research and community organizing. Using a day spent with my co-researchers - women on parole - rolling out dough, building our pizzas, and dreaming the next phases of this project, I will share reflections on how the making and sharing of food is an apt site for disruption and resistance, the importance of centering the wisdom of people with lived and living experience and expertise of incarceration (while doing the ongoing work to confront power hierarchies and mitigate the potentials for harm), and how food justice can help harness the privilege of academic research to support resistance against the carceral state.