Meenakshi Verma-Agrawal

Creating Home as Permanent Hyphens: A Session on Belonging, Identity, and Liberation

What is home? A deeper exploration than where we are simply "from," this session invites participants to make connections between home, homeland, and belonging. In spaces never meant for us, how do we reclaim our feeling of home as a memory or a place? Meenakshi Verma-Agrawal and Christopher Tse will utilize small group work and storytelling to facilitate questions like: “Is home something we are creating or something we left behind?” “Is home safety, struggle, or both?” and “Can any of us truly be home on stolen land?”

The BIPOC experience of home has always been and continues to be informed by systemic violence and the demands of the empire. For those of us born into colonial projects with darker skin and coarser hair, we’ve checked the box as "Other" within the USA or Canada. Our mother tongues will always be too foreign, our food too pungent, our ambition too overzealous. Every child of a non-white diaspora knows what it feels like to have their ethnicity perpetually prefixed to their nationality; it is a permanent hyphen.

In a time of mass displacement and forced migration from conflict, capitalism, and climate crisis, these conversations are only more urgent. This session is for everyone who has struggled to find their place in the hyphen, for those longing for home, and for those committed to reimagining home for themselves.

How Do You Cook Your Rice? A Workshop on Food, Healing and Liberation

What is food, and how is it central to timely and urgent conversations around identity, racial justice, community organizing, environmental activism, and decolonization? For so many people, especially BIPOC, food is so much more than what goes in our bellies. It is a lifeline back to other homelands, a conduit for immigrant parents’ love, a medicine that transcends borders, or a map that tells stories of resistance, migration, struggle, survival, and joy. Christopher Tse and Meenakshi Verma-Agrawal will facilitate an interactive space in which we explore and reclaim our relationships with food, community, and identity. Through small group work, circle, and storytelling approaches, this workshop seeks to unpack questions such as: “What’s your favorite cultural practice around food?” “What’s an example of a time you felt embarrassed or ashamed about food?” and “How do you cook your rice?”

In a time of globalization and easy access to other cultures, food has become yet another site of colonialism, power, and white supremacy. Celebrity chefs rave about the utility of turmeric and star anise while gentrification shuts down old kitchen bastions of racialized communities and replaces them with culinary fusion cafes that photograph well for social media. It’s time to reclaim these stories. This workshop is for every kid who’s ever been afraid to open their lunchbox in the cafeteria. We see you, we’ve been there. Let’s talk about shame, and joy, and cut fruit. Let’s talk about spices and identity. Let’s talk about how we cook rice.