"Healing Horticulture" will examine how food and herb gardens constituted a formative health practice that connected families, women healers, and communities within global diasporic healing traditions across the early 20th century rural U.S. South. By examining home gardening practices as a health intervention, this paper will examine the production and circulation of nutritional knowledge in the context of rural agriculture, focusing on the people, places, and institutions that generated meaningful health interventions in rural communities, where historic gaps in healthcare infrastructure prompted the creation of community-based care models.

This paper examines the origins and impact of National Negro Health Week, emphasizing the pivotal roles played by African American communities in Kansas City, Kansas, and Kansas City, Missouri. These cities emerged as hubs for disseminating health knowledge throughout the Midwest. National Negro Health Week, initiated in 1915 by Booker T. Washington, aimed to address the health disparities faced by African Americans by promoting public health education and practices within Black communities. This paper highlights how local initiatives in Kansas City were instrumental in fostering community engagement and health awareness.
In the Kansas cities, local African American leaders, organizations, nurses, and physicians embraced the objectives of National Negro Health Week, organizing events, lectures, and health screenings that reached a broad audience. These activities aimed to improve health outcomes and empower African American communities by providing them with the knowledge and resources needed to advocate for their health. The success of these initiatives in Kansas City served as a model for other midwestern cities, demonstrating the effectiveness of community-based health education. In response, Black health activists initiated several other community health events, including well-baby clinics and dental clinics.
By tracing the flow of health information from Kansas City to other parts of the Midwest, I will reveal the broader impact of local health initiatives on regional public health. This work contributes to a deeper understanding of the historical efforts to improve African American health and the enduring legacy of National Negro Health Week in promoting health equity.

This paper analyzes the new avenues in popular epidemiology explored by women activists in California. As an organization active in Los Angeles County between 1986 and the 2010s and formed by Chicanx women activists, The Mothers of East Los Angeles publicized the environmental degradation impacting their communities through a focus on their children’s health. Similarly, the 1000 Grandmothers for Future Generations has been active in the San Francisco Bay area between 2016 and 2024 and has promoted intergenerational solidarity, providing elder women activists with a platform to engage with environmental justice and environmental health issues impacting younger generations. Comprising mostly mothers and grandmothers, both organizations have deployed innovative campaigns targeting industrial polluters and bringing attention to environmental injustice, while complexifying gender-based and feminist narratives of empowerment. Building on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork conducted in California between 2022 and 2024, this paper looks at how environmental justice movements have been enriched by the specific perspectives of grandparents and parents. Far from remaining relegated to the spheres of domesticity, grandmothers and mothers have become publicly active to protect the best interests of their children living in communities impacted by industrial and petrotoxic residues. This paper shows to what extent parenthood and grandparenthood, conjugated with positive experiences in sorority networks, can be envisioned as specific forms of social capital that enable individuals with no previous experience of activism to take a stand. This paper also takes a self-reflexive approach, building on previous research about intersectionality, positionality, gender relations and ethnography.

In diabetes management, life is fostered through continuous monitoring of biological measures such as blood glucose, weight, blood pressure, diet, and exercise. However, older adult Hmong Americans find this chronic model unsatisfying, especially as refugees who must live out life in the empire where the structural vulnerabilities of racism, capitalism, and patriarchy expose them to ongoing economic precarity, social isolation, and the undoing of marital and familial relations. Challenging both the misconception that diabetes management is enough and that the refugee is saved upon resettlement in the empire, this paper engages the chronic refugee (the social figure of the refugee who develops a chronic disease post-resettlement) as a feminist refugee critique that 1) bears witness to the ongoing slow death for refugees in the empire, 2) reimagines life as otherwise, not defined by nation-state nor by biopolitical value, but rather through reclamation of one’s own sovereign power and 3) through the act of (re)membering those displaced and marginalized under the biopolitical project of U.S. imperialism. This paper draws on ethnographic research of diabetes group visits, interviews, and patient-provider interactions conducted over two years in Minnesota.