Since 1984, the AHV journal has provided a key forum for a community of interdisciplinary, international researchers, educators, and policy makers to analyze and debate core issues, values and hopes facing the nation and the world, and to recommend strategies and actions for addressing them. This agenda includes the more specific challenges and opportunities confronting agriculture, food systems, science, and communities, as well as broader contextual issues and grand challenges. This paper draws extensively on 40 years of AHV journal articles (...) and reviews and begins with a focus on a limited number of key grand challenges (climate change and global warming; threats to democracy and the growing neo-nationalism, populism, and authoritarianism; and increasing national and international inequality). With these challenges as the underlining context, the remainder of the paper addresses core journal themes of sustainable agriculture and local food systems, citizen and public science, and empowered communities. Highlighted are numerous important journal contributions to the analyses and recommendations to address these hopes and themes. I conclude that these themes and hopes not only deserve to live but are essential for changing and redirecting an unsustainable and destructive environmental, economic, political and social agenda to a viable, livable and just democratic society. (shrink)

The Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society and the journal _Agriculture and Human Values_ provided a crucial intellectual space for the early transdisciplinary critique of the industrial agrifood system. This paper describes that process and presents the concept of “The Doctors of Agrifood Studies” as a metaphor for the key role critical agrifood social scientists played in documenting the unsustainability of conventional agriculture and working to create an alternative, ethical, sustainable agrifood system. After the introduction, the paper details the “Critical (...) Turn” in agrifood studies, followed by a reconsideration of my “Four Questions” framework, focusing on the current tension between the food security and food sovereignty discourses and movements. (shrink)

In her 2020 Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society presidential address, Molly Anderson outlined three ways to push beyond boundaries imposed on us and by us to work towards addressing global food system and societal problems. In this response essay, I draw on my experiences and my perspectives as a pre-tenure rural sociologist who is not from around here to highlight how I attempt to push beyond boundaries in my own work and to discuss challenges associated with the feasibility of (...) some of Molly’s call. I also build on Molly’s call for boundary work including a broadening of international collaborations through increased engagement in cross-national comparative research, pivoting from interacting with global social movements to interacting with key stakeholders, and deepening of anti-discrimination work through the use of an intersectionality lens. Arguing that Molly’s call for action is bold but needed, I close my essay with a set of questions that I hope can contribute to larger discussions on how we can help one another push beyond boundaries to work towards more fair and sustainable food systems. (shrink)