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Hilary B. Booker, Ph.D., is a 2017 graduate of the Ph.D. Program in Environmental Studies at Antioch University, New England

Dissertation Committee:

  • Elizabeth McCann, Ph.D., Committee Chair
  • Jean Kayira, Ph.D., Committee Member
  • Selima Hauber, Ph.D., Committee Member
  • Jean Amaral, Committee Member

Keywords

Consciousness, Bahamas, food practices, healing, restoration, decolonization, Caribbean, Caribbean Critique, Poetics, Foodways, Diaspora, African Diaspora, Aesthetics, Food Security, Nassau

Document Type

Dissertation

Publication Date

2017

Abstract

This research explores intentional food practices and journeys of consciousness in a network of people in The Bahamas. Intentional food practices are defined as interactions with food chosen for particular purposes, while journeys of consciousness are cumulative successions of events that people associate with healing, restoration, and decolonization personally and collectively. This research examines (1) experiences and moments that influenced people’s intentional food practices; (2) food practices that people enact daily; and (3) how people’s intentional food practices connect to broader spiritual, philosophical, and ideological perspectives guiding their lives. The theoretical framework emerges from a specific lineage of theories and philosophies of hybridity, diaspora, creolization, poetics, critique, and aesthetics from the Caribbean. The research explores how intentional food practices reflect expressions of emerging foodways and identities in the Caribbean and joins them with the history of consciousness and intentional food practices in African and Caribbean diasporas. Ethnographic research methods, poetic analysis, and constant comparative analysis provided a foundation for an exploratory approach grounded in the realities of everyday lives. A purposeful snowball sample of twenty-seven (27) in-depth semi-structured interviews provided a primary method of data collection, supported by personal journals, field notes, and document review. No food security research has been published that explores intentional food practices in The Bahamas generally or on the island of New Providence specifically. Key findings suggest a broad variation in people’s intentional practices. The intentions underlying these practices reflect desires for individual and collective healing, restoration, and decolonization in their daily lives. By exploring their food practices, interviewees express how they find restoration and healing through visceral experiences with their bodies.

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Hilary B. Booker

ORCID Scholar ID# 0000-0001-5876-9566

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