Understanding Just Sustainabilities from Within: A Case Study of a Shared-Use Commercial Kitchen in Connecticut

Phoebe Godfrey’s Understanding Just Sustainabilities from Within: A Case Study of a Shared-Use Commercial Kitchen in Connecticut leverages a unique insider-outsider perspective to present a reflective evaluation of the theory and practice of just sustainabilities. While at first glance the singular focus on a Commercially Licensed Co-operative Kitchen (CLiCK) in Willimantic, Connecticut might sound esoteric, Godfrey situates her case in the broader literatures on food justice and nonprofit organizing, deriving key insights for the study and practice of just sustainabilities in the United States. Most distinctively, Godfrey is unabashed about her political project of pursuing social and environmental justice as praxis, and this intellectual activism empowers her to deliver expansive critiques to environmental sociology, as well. The case, which centers a small town in northeast Connecticut, diversifies the types of places where just sustainabilities have been studied beyond large cities to the smaller and more numerous towns spread across the United States. A key disciplinary contribution of the book is its attempts to reinvigorate a public sociology tradition. Godfrey practices public sociology in three ways: in how she devised and conducted her research (as inseparable from her work as an activist, as long-term, community-engaged, and self-reflexive), from her citational politics (elevating Black feminist thinking and case studies of intersectional environmentalism as performed by women of color), and in her writing style. The book is largely written in an accessible style and voice, with careful explanation of the theory and concepts invoked. Part I introduces the conceptual framework of the book, which links the theoretical lineages of just sustainabilities with intersectionality theories. Chapter One provides a literature review of the concept of sustainability, its critiques from environmental justice movements, and its subsequent evolution into just sustainabilities. Chapter Two locates intersectionality in the Black feminist scholar-activist tradition before extending it in relation to the ‘‘environment’’ through Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh’s concept of ‘‘interbeing.’’ Grounding intersectional theories of justice in place, and embedding discussions of social identity in materiality, Godfrey reasserts the original emphasis on praxis in intersectionality theorizing. This is Godfrey’s attempt to recover intersectionality from the ‘‘deracinated buzzword versions’’ emerging in environmental scholarship and activism. Conversely, by embedding intersectionality within the just sustainabilities framework, Godfrey argues that sustainability practitioners such as herself are driven to reflect on their positionalities and not let the names and concerns of society’s most oppressed ‘‘fall through the cracks’’ (p. 40). Chapter Three amplifies key examples of intersectional environmental scholarship and activism to demonstrate what putting these insights into praxis could look like. Having oriented the reader to her conceptual framework and political stakes, in Part II Godfrey moves into her case; and this is where this reader found herself less convinced. For one, Godfrey tells rather than shows. And while her method is advertised as a combination of autoethnography and collaborative ethnography, the autoethnographic sections are much better developed than the latter. Indeed, the book surprisingly lacks ethnographic vignettes that might animate her narrative. The use of interview quotes of CLiCK stakeholders distributed across the book is disjointed and disconnected from the rest of the text. Moreover, the quoted passages do not give the reader a good sense of how CLiCK’s diverse stakeholders (board members, individual members or users, nonprofit and institutional members) perceived and interacted with the organization or with each other, at different stages. Additionally, while she describes how cooperative principles were included in the charter of the organization at its creation, I Reviews 49