Category: Culture

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Now, more than ever, we need art to do the heavy lifting of defining our values.

Cultural Currency is a bi-monthly romp through the intersection of art and capital with writer Cara Marsh Sheffler.

In the art world this year, many a gallery’s story has ended with Chapter 11. For those who’ve been paying attention, this wasn’t surprising. Art sales are slipping everywhere, down as much as 35% at Art Basel. This month, the Financial Times reported that blue chip Hauser & Wirth’s London profits have slid a staggering 90%. August mid-tier galleries have begun shuttering with alarming frequency: Blum, Kasmin, and Venus Over Manhattan, to name a few. For artists and galleries alike, the walls are literally and metaphorically caving in: the model of an entire industry predicated on selling to a few rich people is no longer working.

When the hero’s journey comes to its final chapter, a certain existential reckoning occurs. The life and death of ideas is very real: many far outlive their usefulness, and perhaps one that needs to die right now is the idea that art should exist on the market principally as a financial tool. Art fairs are expensive, rents are obscene, and a global economic downturn accented with the panic and chaos of trade wars and ethno-nationalism all point toward the necessity of conservative budgets and cost-cutting. Yes, the tie between money, power, and art is irrefutable, the backbone and lifeblood of art history. But as the midtier market collapses, it might be nice to finally unfuck the gap between the hand-to-mouth life of the artist and the value of art in the market, beginning with a trial separation—at least as a thought exercise—between money and art.

Now, more than ever, we need art to do the heavy lifting of defining our values. Alternative thought is essential when the capitalistic world has agreed—with zero referendum—that artificial thought is in any way preferential or superior. By subscribing to the centrism that masquerades as progressivism in the United States, the art world lost touch with the political landscape and, with that disorientation, any ability to question it. Amid the art market highs and market-oriented inclusivity, art has also lost its critical capacity.

But what is the value of art that cannot be sold? What might be the purpose of art that is simply not meant to sit aside a red dot? Historically, of course, we have performance art and Situationism, along with their descendants. But, beyond art that is merely difficult to commodify, what does an expression of cultural values look like when consciously uncoupled from the art market?

I pondered these questions as I walked around my favorite show I have seen all year, Lydia Eccles’ “Jokes About Bombs Will Not Be Taken Lightly,” which was up at Goswell Road, an artist-run space in Paris, from May 15 until June 14. In 1995, Eccles, a Boston-based artist, had one hell of an idea for an art project. Rather than taking a ho-hum trip to the supply store, she nominated the Unabomber—at the height of his anonymous reign of terror—in the 1996 US presidential election. The show was a documentation of that campaign and the ensuing pen-pal relationship Eccles formed with Ted Kaczynski after his arrest and throughout his incarceration.

Conceptual art has given us everything from Chris Burden having a friend shoot him to Agnes Denes turning a strip of downtown Manhattan to a wheatfield. Art in this vein pushes what can be a canvas for expression: the human body, landfill. But never before had I seen an artist decide their chosen medium was a presidential election. By participating in the political arena with all the familiar trappings of the era—signs, slogans, bumper stickers, and even a dedicated camera crew—Eccles showed a presidential campaign for what it is: an hysterical circus that plays to our basest fears, one where infamy and fame are interchangeable.

Eccles documents the Unabomber’s “run” alongside his more literal run from the law and the dance he did with the media, most notably and implausibly with Bob Guccione. Her prolific campaigning warranted its own inane and disturbingly underinformed coverage. At one point in the winter of 1996, WRKO radio reported, “There are more Unabomber signs than there are for Clinton, Gore, or all the Republicans, so it looks like the Unabomber is leading in this precinct.” In a time of Luigi Mangione fandom and a renewed, bi-partisan interest in Kaczynski, “Jokes About Bombs” offered a riveting, prescient, wholly prophetic anti-capitalist critique of technology’s role in a broken political system. The phrase “artistic intervention” has been worn out to the point of farce, but Eccles had staged one in a presidential election and a federal manhunt.

I had to own the catalogue.

But: how to get it home??? The cover showed an old-fashioned political sign stuck in sludgy snow amid a warren of placards for Bob Dole and Pat Buchanan:

DON’T WASTE YOUR VOTE!
Write-in for President
UNABOMBER ’96
If elected he will not serve
★ VOTE AGAINST REPUBLICANS
★ VOTE AGAINST DEMOCRATS
★ VOTE AGAINST CORPORATE TECHNOLOGY
All you have to lose is the political illusion…
ARE YOU READY FOR THE RUPTURE?

I imagined myself at customs, declaring this tome. Anthony Stephenson, the gallery’s convivial proprietor, asked me if it would be so terrible to be stuck in France forever. He had a point. Still, I demurred and, frankly, chickened out of buying a book I really wanted to own.

In my own cowardice, I recognized that Eccles’ show was lightning in a bottle, and that my own hesitation indicated that I was in the presence of something genuinely avant-garde. I’d been conditioned to the shopping malls of art fairs, swapping out the Orange Julius and TCBY of my New Jersey childhood for the (aptly named) Ruinart Champagne Lounge. Despite my arty existence, in that moment of contact, I realized that coming across art that is actually outré (if you like your French cultural theory) or verboten (if you prefer your Germans), and has purpose, simply had not been my experience of most galleries where, at best, I sigh and think “Gee, if only I had a cool $30K lying around…” Like the idea of owning its catalogue, the show itself freaked me out a bit. I felt alive in my mind and privileged to be in the room, as well as to meet Eccles herself.

In its early pages, the catalogue for “Jokes About Bombs” contains the text of a speech James Baldwin gave in 1962, “Art is here to prove, and to help one bear, the fact that all safety is an illusion. All artists are divorced from and even opposed to necessarily any system whatever.” These are, of course, the sorts of moral standards we expect whenever we read James Baldwin, who had a sixth sense for integrity the way sea turtles and migratory birds can use the earth’s magnetic fields for navigation. While I ultimately left the catalogue behind, as spring turned to summer, I let his words guide my art viewing.

I came across two moral stand-outs in London. The first was Ed Atkins at the Tate Britain, best known for his computer-generated, incredibly unsettling videos that plumb the uncanny valley. Atkins has been exploring the genre for decades, well ahead of AI moral and economic panic. Seeing his career retrospective made me think of a Democracy Now interview I saw with Karen Hao, who pointed out that, as we have no agreed-upon scientific definition of human intelligence, what, exactly, is Artificial Intelligence? Is it merely a projection of our perceived notion of intelligence, skewed entirely by capitalistic values? Are we creating “intelligent” bots with the same level of foresight and ethical depth as rare dog breeds concocted by bored, rich people that are so helpless they cannot even fuck on their own? (A sharp new ad for Merriam-Webster slyly posits their dictionary as an LLM and ends with the tagline, “There’s artificial intelligence, and then there is actual intelligence.”)

The second stand-out was “Leigh Bowery!” at the Tate Modern, a retrospective of fashion and nightclubbing as artistic expression. The text at the entrance to the exhibit read: “In his brief life Bowery was described as many things. Among them: fashion designer, club monster, human sculpture, nude model, vaudeville drunkard, anarchic auteur, pop surrealist, clown without a circus, piece of moving furniture, modern art on legs. However, he declared, ‘if you label me, you negate me,’ and always refused classification, commodification, and conformity.” The show was a riveting reminder of transgression and artistic expression in the face of AIDS, discrimination, and the rise of conservatism—and a call for the same as we face rising global authoritarianism today. In an era where fashion often feels like the reductio ad absurdum of vapid aspirational mass consumption amid our ever more precarious existences, online and in debt, Bowery’s ability to imbue costume with so much intellectual ambition and drive floored me.

These three exhibitions were recentering as reminders that art’s purpose—its true value—shouldn’t be monetary. Moreover, those figures don’t mean much just before a crash, when the numbers game is more of a hiding-the-real-numbers game. While blue chip galleries and their deep war chests can ride out the chaos for now, Hauser & Wirth’s stumble may tell us otherwise.

Right now, it is vital to uncouple cultural values from the marketplace. Commercial worth has always been baked into ideologies that align with power, whether you’re talking about royal court painters or the CIA and Abstract Expressionism. The market then reinforces that notion of value over and over again in a way that resonates into institutions and educational systems. Yes, that art market is experiencing a downturn that might spell collapse for many. It won’t be pleasant. However, chaos presents an opportunity for a reappraisal, and for finding what was lost. I would argue that—whether you love it or hate it—art that passes the Baldwin litmus test is a great place to start understanding what art with a valid critical stance looks like at this very moment in time.

Such art demands the same moral clarity from its viewers, too: I did return to Goswell Road this summer, and I bought the catalogue for “Jokes About Bombs Will Not Be Taken Lightly.” Despite my concerns, the book made it home through customs.

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October 28, 2025October 28, 2025

The Value of Art That Can’t Be Sold

by Cara Marsh Sheffler

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Why eating disorders are so prevalent in Latinx and AAPI communities in the U.S.

It was a summer morning in 2001 when 11-year-old Elizabeth Moscoso realized her body was growing in width "unlimitedly." Before puberty, her figure had been slim, smooth, and long. But in recent months, it had become almost unrecognizable, as if it did not belong to her; her body suddenly covered in thick, black hair, and curves where there had once been straight lines. She desperately wanted to get rid of them. “This body…isn’t mine,” Moscoso, now 35, thought. That morning, she shared these thoughts with her mother, a Guatemalan immigrant who had moved to the United States decades prior. Leaving the kitchen, her mother returned and handed Elizabeth a solution: a dark gray faja.

A faja—a type of girdle that wraps tightly around the abdomen—is supposed to shape people’s, usually women’s, bodies to make them appear slimmer, giving them an hourglass figure. It’s also meant to increase sweating, and eventually, help with weight loss. Elizabeth wanted to feel pretty, and to her, that meant having a small waist, so she accepted her mom’s help and let her wrap her body in the faja. It was immediately uncomfortable; and soon, she began to sweat. Still, she felt determined: Elizabeth continued wearing the faja every day for the next month.

“I hoped that this would work, like a cocoon, and that after a while, I would come out beautiful and different, more like I'd always wanted to be,” she says.

Growing up, Elizabeth would watch Mexican telenovelas after school, enraptured by the beautiful women portrayed on screen. She also noticed a pattern: The women who found true and eternal love on these shows were usually pale, thin, and clean-shaven, their hair always perfectly curled. “Do I need to be like them to be loved?” she asked herself. But she wasn’t sure. Growing up in Southern California, in a Guatemalan and Ecuadorian household, she was surrounded by contradicting beauty standards. Her grandmother said beauty meant having curvy calves; her mom believed it was having hips and breasts, with a slim waist; her classmates believed it meant being extremely thin. Confused and desperate to fit in, it was around this time that Elizabeth began wearing the faja.

Soon after, she also developed an eating disorder. Within a matter of months, Elizabeth had begun an extreme dieting regime, and would hide herself in baggy clothes—even in summer. She began using hair removal creams on her arms, and later began bleaching the hair blonde.

“I was feeling uncomfortable and confused because I didn’t see my white peers experiencing the same,” Elizabeth says. “But I wasn’t sure what was going on with me; I did not have the language. I wanted to stop restricting and exercising compulsively but I couldn’t.”

Unfortunately, Elizabeth’s experience struggling with Western beauty standards isn’t an uncommon one. A study by Florida International University found that Latinx and Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities have the highest rates of eating disorder (ED) symptoms in the United States. The main reason is that ethnic minority women who acculturate to Western society are at an increased risk of experiencing body dissatisfaction, due to contradicting beauty standards between their primary and assimilated cultures. In other words, people who come from non-American cultures—or were raised with traditions from other countries, like Elizabeth—often experience stress when trying to adopt the beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors of Western society in order to fit in with its dominant culture.

“For young people who need to feel like they belong to this country, physical appearance is often an element that provides a concrete way of knowing that if they lose weight, get thinner, and look like a white girl, then they will feel like they fit into this culture and be more accepted,” says Mae Lynn Reyes-Rodríguez, clinical psychologist and Associate Director of the Center of Excellence for Eating Disorders at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

This is especially common in first-generation Americans, like Elizabeth, and immigrants who have lived more than 70% of their lives in the U.S., as highlighted in a study published by the International Journal of Eating Disorders.

This pressure has only been exacerbated with the rise of social media in recent years, as beauty standards continuously shift at a lightning pace. In the late 2010s, the growth of the wellness industry, influencer culture, and beauty/fitness content shaped women's beauty ideals towards toned bodies achieved through exercise and "healthy" eating. But more recently, the rise of conservative aesthetics and the popularization of weight-loss medications like Ozempic have been shifting beauty standards again—this time toward bodies that are ultra-thin.

Today, Western beauty ideals promote a teenage—even prepubescent—body, despite the reality that even during their teenage years, people often feel insecure about their bodies and want to change them.

Because thinness is the goal, disordered eating habits that result in dramatic weight loss often don’t raise concerns from clinicians, often delaying diagnoses and care for those who are suffering. In fact, when patients lose weight, many say they are praised for prioritizing their “health.”

Clinicians also aren’t always able to see—nor do they actively look for—disordered eating symptoms in young women of color.

“Providers are trained to look for eating disorders through a white, Western lens,” says Ana Gardner, a Latina clinical supervisor and therapist at Equip, an organization that provides ED treatment in the U.S. “So if somebody doesn't meet the typical profile, their symptoms might not be identified. There's research that primary care doctors are less likely to screen BIPOC patients for eating disorders, even when there are very clear symptoms present.”

Shikha Advani, 25, an Indian American woman who grew up in Michigan, experienced this firsthand: After she rapidly lost weight at 15 years old, her doctors began congratulating her at every routine check-up.

Prior to that, growing up, Shikha had always had a larger body. Her family used to call her mota, the Hindi word for fat, and constantly gave her advice on why she needed to lose weight. Her classmates made fun of her in gym class because she couldn’t run, and taunted her with things like, “Why are you so slow?” or “You’re too big to keep up.” Sometimes it was more subtle: eye rolls, laughter, or whispers when she lagged behind.

“It wasn’t constant, but it stuck with me because it singled me out and made me very aware of my body in a way that felt shaming,” Shikha says.

When she saw her classmates start dating in middle school, Shikha didn’t want to be left out. So she decided she would lose weight—no matter what. She joined the cheerleading team and became a flyer, started running, and restricted her food intake. As she lost weight, the people around her took notice. But despite her efforts, she wasn’t asked to the school dance and was unable to find a significant other—something that only reinforced her idea that she needed to make herself literally and figuratively smaller.

Shikha had witnessed her mother go through a similar cycle of disordered eating when she was still just a baby. After 9/11, the "Global War on Terrorism" led to widespread racial and religious profiling of individuals perceived to be of Middle Eastern or South Asian descent. Her family was targeted.

“My mom wanted to stay small and take up less space, so she could assimilate to society and look like the white folks,” she says. “It was like that for me, as well. We wanted to matter less and to be seen less after all the trauma of 9/11.”

Now, Shikha has a tattoo on her right arm that says “take up space,” a reminder that the only way to help other people of color who experience EDs is by being visible and outspoken, something she tries to practice in her work today as an anti-diet nutritionist.

Shikha was initially drawn to this work because she wasn’t able to access the necessary resources for her own ED recovery—something common for many young people of color. In addition to prohibitive costs, ED recovery treatments in the U.S. also usually follow a Western approach that may reinforce the racism and sexism that contribute to these disorders in the first place. Gloria Lucas, founder of Nalgona Positivity Pride, an organization supporting people of color affected by ED, emphasizes that colonialism is deeply tied to the development and persistence of disordered eating in marginalized communities. It leads to food insecurity, the disruption of traditional food systems, the imposition of Eurocentric beauty standards, medical violence, and trauma from discrimination.

But even those who might accept a Westernized ED treatment often can’t access it. Most U.S. health insurance plans don’t cover the full cost of treatment. Medicaid is accepted by only a few ED clinics, and Medicare offers limited coverage and doesn’t include nutritional counseling.

“An eating disorder can be very expensive, especially depending on its severity,” Reyes-Rodríguez says. “Treatments require a team-based approach; there must be a doctor, nutritionist, therapist, and often a psychiatrist. The later it is diagnosed, the more expensive it becomes as people would need more effort and resources.”

For those who choose to pay for treatment out of pocket, the costs can quickly become prohibitive. Malena Román Giovanetti, 20, born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico, experienced this firsthand. Most of her childhood, she remained very healthy, but at 14 she began to struggle with disordered eating. At home, she watched as some of her relatives followed strict diets to modify their bodies; at school, she barely had any friends. Her ED became a coping mechanism to regain a sense of control. After four months, she told her mom, who quickly found the only clinic in San Juan—and the only clinic on the entire island of Puerto Rico—that offers ED treatment. It didn’t accept insurance, so her family paid out of pocket. Malena regained some weight, but continued to struggle with body dissatisfaction and intrusive thoughts. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, she relapsed. Her family had to pay even more for online therapy.

“My parents went into a lot of debt and stuff to try to pay for my treatment,” Malena says. “It made me feel really bad.”

Guilt is one of the most common feelings shared amongst people experiencing an ED: guilt over expenses, guilt for breaking food rules, guilt for losing control, guilt for not meeting unrealistic standards, guilt for worrying others, and guilt for not being able to share joy with loved ones over food.

This guilt is multiplied across many AAPI and Latinx cultures because, despite the diversity and heterogeneity between them, they share one thing in common: Food is central to family, and to social life. Food is celebration, love, community, and care. Rejecting a dish prepared by a relative is often perceived as rejecting their love and effort. These cultures are the vivid proof that food is more than just a biological need: It is a way to celebrate culture. But while joyful, these gatherings are also rife with body shaming and unfiltered commentary on physical appearance.

For Anoova Sattar, a 17-year-old Bangladeshi American, attending family gatherings became difficult when she developed her ED, because of her self-imposed food restrictions. Rice, for example, is a staple in Bangladeshi cuisine, but Anoova avoided it.

When eating with other Bangladeshi families, she felt anxious about being exposed to triggering foods and the inevitable comments about her weight. Everyone seemed happy that the once-chubby Anoova was now slender. But this didn’t stop them from commenting on what she was or wasn’t eating; and there was no space to talk about how she truly felt about any of it, or how much she was struggling.

“I've never been comfortable with the thought of seeking therapy,” Anoova says. “It's just never been something comfortable for me, because I don't really like sharing so much personal information with one person to help myself. If it helps others, then it's fine.”

To that end, Anoova recently founded a social media initiative called Shuno to raise awareness about EDs in the South Asian community. Through this project, she is working on a directory of South Asian ED providers in the U.S. But despite encouraging others to seek help, she continues to manage her ED on her own.

“Something common both in the AAPI and the Latinx communities is that there's a lot of stigma towards mental health,” says Gardner. “It's not always encouraged to seek out help or talk about it with others, and sometimes, depending on spirituality or cultural beliefs, it could be believed that it's that person's fault.”

For Anoova, visiting Bangladesh while dealing with her ED also brought a new layer of guilt.

“People there are concerned about getting access to food, because it controls whether or not they live or die,” Anoova says. “It’s a matter of life and death for them, but for me, here, appearance also becomes life or death, because eating disorders [anorexia] have the highest fatality rate among psychiatric illnesses.”

In the Global South, even those seeking help may quite literally lack the language to do so: The words for “eating disorder” simply do not exist in their mother tongue. Sometimes, however, this inability to translate it can be a means of self-protection, too.

Julia, who requested we not include her last name for privacy reasons, moved from China to Nevada with her mom when she was four. As an only child, the only English speaker in her household, an Ivy League graduate, and someone who quickly landed a good job after school, Julia was her mother’s pride. But eventually, that burden started to grow heavy for Julia, as her mother’s expectations for her often extended beyond her accomplishments.

Growing up, Julia's mother frequently commented on her appearance: Her skin wasn’t pale enough, her body wasn’t slim enough, her eyes needed to be wider. Her mother embodied the Chinese beauty standard and expected Julia to mirror it.

“It wasn’t malicious, but there were so many comments,” Julia says. “So in high school, I became super aware of my size. My mom said that as I was growing into a woman, I needed to be pretty to attract men.”

When Julia moved to New York City to study Sociology and Global Liberal Studies, living on her own meant she could make her own choices for the first time, without supervision. She began working out at the gym, purging, compensating, and dieting. When her mother saw her again, she congratulated her, saying she was finally learning to take care of herself. Her friends praised her, as well, admiring her discipline.

Julia has had an ED for nearly 10 years now, but only received a diagnosis five years ago—by accident. She had been struggling with ADHD and had sought medication and support. During an appointment with a therapist, she mentioned her eating habits, which is when she was formally diagnosed.

“My doctor didn’t notice or ask anything about my eating habits—I told her,” Julia says. “I wasn’t expecting them to notice, because unless I was severely underweight or had abnormal bloodwork, I [didn’t] see why they would ask.”

Julia has shared her story on podcasts and on social media, but her family still doesn’t know about her diagnosis. Since they don’t speak English or use social media, she’s been able to keep it hidden.

“I literally don’t know the word for eating disorder in Chinese,” Julia says. “And honestly, I don’t know how I’d ever bring it up. Culturally, my mom’s response would be like, ‘Oh, why would you do that?’ There would be no productive conversation. At a certain point, you have to accept that there are conversations you’ll never be able to have with them because of a cultural gap. And I’m kind of okay with it.”

Julia wrote her mom a poem—of love and detachment on her expectations on Julia’s appearance, of recognizing her mother while also recognizing herself:

“She says she is waning
That she withers while I blossom
But I’m just barely budding
While she lives in full bloom

I’m not as slender
I don’t share the same curls
Ruby red never suited me
Yet she colors my world
She made me bold and unafraid
Like her, I won’t break nor bend
For I am woven from her threads
Just as strong, from start to end.”

As people constantly reminded that they don’t belong, Latinx and AAPI folks in the U.S. face a mental battle over how beauty, health, food, exercise, medicine, and relationships should look. Trying to preserve their heritage while fitting in, trying to be the fulfillment of the American Dream while being appreciated and seen like everyone else—that burden has never been easy to carry. But through the acceptance of diversity and community building, perhaps we might collectively begin to bend towards a more gentle world, one where people don’t merely focus on their physical appearance, but on the joy that food, movement, and social networks inspire.

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October 22, 2025October 27, 2025

A Cocoon for Us to Fit In

by Ana María Betancourt Ovalle

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Season 2 is out now.



We're back! 



Conversationalist readers and listeners, after a long hiatus, I'm so excited to share that season 2 of The Conversationalist Podcast (formerly known as Unbreaking Media) is back. Hosting our podcast has been a great professional joy for me, and it’s been an honor bringing the same depth, care, and human connection that we put into every article on our site into honest, informative conversations with our expert guests on the show. At a time when the free press is under attack around the globe—as corporate media increasingly bows under pressure from authoritarian governments—I treasure the space we've created as a feminist, independent nonprofit for stories and conversations that matter.



This season, we're also introducing something new: half our episodes will feature some of our favorite articles, read by the writers themselves. You'll hear their words, in their own voices, the way they were meant to be heard. The other half of the season will feature original interviews with folks working on the front lines of the issues we care about—from climate justice to reproductive health to fighting back against kleptocracy. We can't wait for you to hear them. 



Listen to season 2 below, and subscribe now wherever you get your podcasts.



Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Simplecast | Pocket Casts | RSS Feed



























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October 7, 2025October 29, 2025

The Conversationalist Podcast is Back

by Anna Lind-Guzik

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Too many promising breakthroughs in women’s health research stall out due to a lack of funding. I’m trying to remove the roadblock for just one.

I was flat on my back on the cold tile of my bathroom floor, with a wet washcloth over my forehead, when I first learned about Dr. Marlena Fejzo’s work. It was December 2023. I was four months pregnant. While I had experienced some nausea in my first pregnancy, my second was an order of magnitude worse, and the bathroom floor was where I spent most of my time, always within arm’s reach of a toilet.

But scrolling through the headlines that day, I found a surprising glimmer of hope. Dr. Fejzo had cracked the code on understanding severe morning sickness, proving a genetic link between the mechanism of pregnancy nausea and vomiting for the first time.

As I fought off another wave of my own nausea, reading about her research felt like a lifeline. Someone was figuring this out. And if a scientist had made such a huge breakthrough, surely treatment couldn’t be too far behind. Not for me, of course. But for women after me.

Right?

It’s important to understand how limited the understanding of pregnancy nausea and vomiting (NVP) was before Dr. Fejzo’s work—and, largely, still is. Nearly seventy percent of women experience some degree of NVP in pregnancy, and yet, before Dr. Fejzo and her collaborators, doctors didn’t know what actually caused it.

Prior to 2023, the historical hypothesis was that hormones, such as estrogen and HCG, were somehow implicated in NVP—but a causal link to nausea and vomiting had never been demonstrated. Just eighteen months ago, my own OB told me, “We don’t know what gives some women morning sickness. Probably those pesky hormones.” (Pesky hormones is not, to my knowledge, a medically meaningful term.) The current edition of perennial bestseller What To Expect While You’re Expecting, updated in 2024, also states that “no one knows for sure what causes pregnancy nausea.” As if vomiting were just part of the elusive mystery of sacred motherhood, not a biological phenomenon that deserves care and answers.

Angered by the lack of medical information on the subject, Marlena Fejzo approached NVP research from the perspective of a geneticist, and that of a survivor. In 1999, Dr. Fejzo had herself suffered from hyperemesis gravidarum, or HG, the most severe form of morning sickness—a debilitating condition which can quickly lead to severe malnutrition. Her doctor was dismissive, accusing her of exaggerating her symptoms and attention-seeking, all while she was fully incapacitated and rapidly losing weight. Tragically, despite a last-resort feeding tube and seven different medications, her condition became too advanced and she lost her pregnancy at 15 weeks gestation.

In the 25 years since, Dr. Fejzo has been committed to researching HG. Her early efforts moved slowly, with little to no funding, carried out alongside her day job researching ovarian cancer. (Complicating her efforts, women vomiting to the point of incapacitation have a hard time participating in research trials.) Dr. Fejzo partnered with the Hyperemesis Education and Research Foundation to set up a web portal, then contacted affected patients individually to obtain DNA samples.

Her work took a huge leap forward when she partnered with private genetics company 23andMe in 2010 to include a question about HG in their health surveys. From those responses, and the genetic data of 50,000 women, Dr. Fejzo was able to determine that HG had a strong genetic link. The greatest risk factor was in a gene that codes the hormone GDF15—which occurs in all humans, but is produced at the highest levels by the placenta. This finding was immediately exciting to Dr. Fejzo. High GDF15 levels were already known to occur in late-stage cancer patients with cachexia, a syndrome that causes weight loss, appetite loss, and muscle wasting—all similar symptoms to pregnant people suffering from HG. The evidence was lining up.

Together with international collaborators, in late 2023, Dr. Fejzo released a groundbreaking paper in Nature, titled GDF15 linked to maternal risk of nausea and vomiting during pregnancy. Simply put, Dr. Fejzo and her collaborators had cracked the code on morning sickness. Even better? Their work suggested methods of prevention and treatment.

When Time Magazine named Dr. Fejzo one of its 2024 “Women of the Year,” they noted, “Fejzo is now applying for funding for a clinical trial to test whether the drug metformin—which is approved to treat Type 2 diabetes but is used off-label for numerous purposes and has been shown to raise GDF15 levels—works as a preventive therapy.”

I was thrilled to hear it. For women who had experienced HG before, or had a family history of it, or who could, hypothetically, take a blood test to gauge their risk—preventative therapy would be life-changing. And, in some cases, life-saving.

The problem, as it turned out, was finding the funding to do it.

Six months after I first read about Dr. Fejzo—this time, attempting to rock a newborn to sleep—I saw a post on a pregnancy message board about an incredible women’s health researcher who could not get funding for a clinical trial.

I almost scrolled by the post, convinced it couldn’t possibly be about the same researcher I’d first learned about while incapacitated on my bathroom floor. But then, I saw her name—and immediately stopped scrolling.

My first naive assumption: that the great capitalist machine would have a profit motive in preventing a condition that affects millions of women—something those women would do anything to solve. My second naive assumption: that promising research gets funded publicly. The post I was now looking at disproved both—a reality that felt equally disillusioning and enraging.

Part of the problem, as it turns out, was precisely that Dr. Fejzo’s research was such an outlier. Since Dr. Fejzo is the only full-time HG researcher in the country, grant review boards still don’t have the expertise to properly review her applications. When researchers of under-studied conditions do not have peer scientists to advocate for them and their research, their work often goes overlooked. As Caroline Criado Perez writes in her book Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, “It’s not always easy to convince someone a need exists if they don’t have that need themselves.” As of writing, Dr. Fejzo has been denied seven different grants.

Learning this, my vague notions of “science” and “progress” quickly crumbled. I’d previously had some kind of faith that medical problems existed; and then scientists solved them; and then we all benefited. But of course, there is no abstract body of “science,” and scientists are people who require resources to perform their work. It had never occurred to me to question where, exactly, those resources actually came from.

Scientific breakthroughs do not, on their own, produce follow-up funding. Neither does media attention or critical acclaim. Visibility is important, of course. But it doesn’t automatically turn into dollars. As Time noted, Dr. Fejzo had intended, and still intends, to launch her clinical trial with an existing generic drug, metformin—something already known to have a good safety profile in women trying to conceive, lowering potential risk for participants. But the use of this drug is also why there’s no profit motive for pharmaceutical companies to invest some of the $83 billion—with a B—dollars they put into research and development each year: The drug already exists.

Moreover, resourcing women’s health research funding, already challenging, faces stiffer headwinds than ever. As of 2020, only 5 percent of healthcare-related R&D efforts are targeted specifically at women’s health issues—and most of that is dedicated to female-specific cancers, leaving only 1% of all medical research dollars invested in all other female-specific conditions, including maternal health conditions, menopause, endometriosis, and the like.

While the women’s health gap is a global issue, it feels particularly acute in the United States of 2025, where the current administration has also made abundantly clear that they do not consider women’s health a priority. The New York Times reported that terms such as “female,” “uterus,” and “mental health,” painted with the indiscriminate brush of “DEI,” can get a grant submission flagged for further review. According to JAMA (The Journal of the American Medical Association), overall grants disbursed by the National Institute of Health (NIH) are down $1.8 billion in 2025. Recently, NIH funding for a landmark women’s health study of 40-plus years was revoked, before being reinstated due to public outcry. Meanwhile, even research grants for active scientific projects face termination when they “no longer meet agency priorities.” (A quick perusal of these terminated NIH grants includes plenty with “pregnancy,” “breast,” or “ovarian” in the title… and none with “prostate,” “penile,” or “testicular.” Priorities, indeed.)

In just the last eight months, Dr. Fejzo has spoken at the White House, lectured at Harvard and Yale, and won prestigious awards. Her most recent paper in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology garnered a great deal of attention from the OB-GYN community; and her work has been extensively profiled both in major outlets such as The Guardian, and influential parenting newsletters like Emily Oster’s ParentData. There seems to be a consensus that this work is essential; that it deserves attention and further research. Yet none of this has actually translated to funding.

This enraged and frustrated me. I found the pregnancy message board post and got in touch with its author—who, it turned out, had been desperately hoping Dr. Fejzo was already conducting clinical trials, and had been devastated to learn they hadn’t even yet begun. She put me in touch with the researcher herself. “In terms of fundraising, I need all the help I can get,” Dr. Fejzo emailed me.

Over the course of several conversations, hearing about her difficulties in obtaining funding and the incredible promise of her work, I became convinced that someone needed to be a champion for Dr. Fejzo’s work. And it might as well be me. This is how I—a complete outsider, whose last brush with genetics was MOLBIO 101 twenty-odd years ago—launched myself into fundraising for medical research.

Some familiarity with the nonprofit world was a big help. Since Dr. Fejzo works at the University of Southern California, donations to her work are routed through USC as a 501(c)3 research university, making them eligible for tax deductions, some corporate matching programs, and various other mechanisms that make a donation financially advantageous. (And supporters aren’t writing a check to an entity they’d never heard of.) I also worked with USC to set up an ongoing crowdfunding page so that interested people can donate any amount directly to Dr. Fejzo’s research fund and share within their own networks, GoFundMe-style.

I’ve made deep connections in incredible women’s funding networks such as Women Moving Millions, whose bold members are dedicated to advancing women’s well-being in every arena. We’ve hosted a number of webinars where anyone interested could hear from Dr. Fejzo directly. I leaned on the advice of friends in the academic and media worlds; I tapped every alumni and professional network I had. I dug around for matching programs through organizations including #HalfMyDAF and Pivotal Ventures that could leverage existing gifts; I got social media boosts from the HER Foundation, which does incredible work supporting and connecting hyperemesis patients and providers.

And finally, I’ve spent the last 10-odd months talking up Dr. Fejzo’s work to absolutely anyone who will listen. I’ve found that friends and colleagues are pretty interested when you adopt a single-minded crusade against morning sickness. (One stone still unturned: celebrity outreach. I haven’t found a contact for Princess Kate yet, who publicly shared her harrowing experience with HG during all three of her pregnancies. If you happen to know her, put us in touch.)

We’ve raised nearly $750,000 thus far, a testament to the power of collective action. But we still have a long way to go: Dr. Fejzo needs $1.3 million to go forward with her clinical trial—a sum of money which is both significant, and yet so tiny in the scheme of research dollars.

As my fundraising has shown me, though, this is completely doable—because I’m not the only one who feels motivated by Dr. Fejzo’s work. There is a true hunger for her research among women who have previously suffered HG. In fact, many individuals have emailed Dr. Fejzo—who, again, is a researcher, not a medical doctor—to ask whether she might help their own doctors suggest a metformin protocol. Essentially, pregnant people are volunteering themselves as studies of one, outside the controls and protections of clinical trials, out of sheer desperation for a better alternative to the pain they’re suffering through.

I think back to my own experience. I did not have full-blown HG; I had a less severe experience with nausea and vomiting that, while deeply disruptive to my everyday life, was not ultimately dangerous to me or my baby. Yet I still emerged from the experience absolutely desperate for better care. I would have done anything in my power, and paid anything within my means, for the nausea to go away. For women who end up hospitalized, it’s many orders of magnitude worse.

This is also why Dr. Fejzo’s inability to access followup funding makes me so angry. I’m angry that women’s pain isn’t considered a priority. Angry that women aren’t considered reliable narrators of their own experience. Angry that a primary response to any complication during pregnancy seems to be “suck it up.” That women, and pregnant women especially, are given vague assurances like, “Your baby is fine! It’ll get what it needs,” without any evidence to support those claims. (Oh, you’re vomiting multiple times a day? Well, didn’t you want a baby? What did you expect?)

This anger is motivating. But for those suffering from HG, it’s impossible to harness that rage into action while utterly incapacitated, fearing for the safety and health of your baby and yourself. HG can be dehumanizing—taking away your ability to advocate, fight, or do much more than exist. It’s on the rest of us, then, to rally for those who can’t.

Where funding goes, and where it doesn’t, communicates something unmistakable about what society values—and clearly, addressing women’s suffering does not rank very high on that list. So what can we do? Well, we can start by crowdfunding one critical clinical trial, then another, and another. Collectively funding public good is a foundation of society, and perhaps it can continue despite the failure of official systems to support it, if we come together to put our dollars where they count.

Should there be better ways to fund this kind of research? Yes. Are there better solutions than crowdfunding out there? Maybe. But until then, it’s time we reclaim some control, and fund the damn research ourselves.

[post_title] => Let's Fund the Damn Research Ourselves [post_excerpt] => Too many promising breakthroughs in women’s health research stall out due to a lack of funding. I’m trying to remove the roadblock for just one. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => morning-sickness-womens-health-research-pregnancy-funding-science-studies-hyperemesis-gravidarum-marlena-fejzo-fundraising [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-10-10 15:28:09 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-10-10 15:28:09 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=9639 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

September 19, 2025October 10, 2025

Let’s Fund the Damn Research Ourselves

by Carey Jones

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 8823 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-09-09 21:36:41 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-09-09 21:36:41 [post_content] =>

Over-processed produce is disconnecting us from where food comes from.

The way it looked promised richness and flavor. Sharp green leaves, stemless, in a transparent plastic package with the words “organic” and “triple-washed.” It was something I’d never seen before: ready-to-eat spinach with no dirt, worms, or roots. In Colombia, my home country, produce always needed to be washed. Spinach, in particular, needed extra effort, because it was always sold as a whole. I usually soaked it in vinegar and lemon for half an hour to kill any parasites or bacteria. But in the United States, everything seemed easy, fast, and reliable—no soaking required. I bought the bag of spinach, and prepared a fresh salad with goat cheese and walnuts. In less than two minutes, it was on my plate. I chewed and chewed. But while there was a hint of spinach in whatever those leaves were, it was certainly not spinach.

In Colombia, I lived in Bogotá, a densely populated and urbanized area. With reduced access to green spaces, I felt most connected to nature through food. Vegetables came from the earth and still carried the signs: roots that once absorbed nutrients, stems that transported water and sugars, bugs that had nibbled on the same leaves I would soon eat, too. Seeing all this reminded me that my food had been grown, not manufactured. It connected me to the farmers who had cultivated, cared for, and harvested it. I felt grounded when peeling, chopping, smelling, washing, and eating my produce. At the end of the day, I was manipulating something that came from the earth.

When I moved to New York City in 2022, I noticed how little people manipulated their food by comparison. Grocery stores sold pre-washed and pre-cut vegetables, and people just opened the packages and threw food on a plate and called it a meal. They didn’t need to bother getting their hands dirty, because their food was already chopped and sanitized.

To me, this disconnect was clearly separating people from nature, making food’s origins feel unfamiliar. When people don’t see, feel, and taste the whole flavor of produce, they also feel less encouraged to eat it. A mango that once grew on a tree, appears nature morte—a dead nature—in a plastic container, more like a granola bar than fruit. In Colombia, produce tasted intense and complex. Spinach, for example, tasted bitter, earthy, and savory. A friend from Peru tells me she avoided fruit her first year in New York because it tasted too sugary and artificial. Another friend from Mexico will only eat pineapple, because she thinks other fruits taste as if they’ve been diluted in a water and sugar solution.

The University of Florida found the reason that fruits, like tomatoes, taste so insipid in the U.S. is because, in the pursuit of higher yield, disease resistance, and shelf life, the genes responsible for flavor were bred out. While unsanitized produce may be risky for gastrointestinal health, GMO and ready-to-eat produce isn’t necessarily always “safer,” either. Processing facilities or farms, for example, frequently wash greens with water and chlorine. While safe in small doses, regular consumption can pose health risks. Other additives, like preservatives or antioxidants, might also cause immune diseases and antibacterial resistance.

It’s also just unnatural. A Colombian friend living in San Francisco tells me she once forgot about a bag of mandarins for two months. When she rediscovered them, they were still edible. “The mandarins were supposed to be spoiled,” she said. “What kind of component do they have to survive for months?”

It is a universal truth that Western society is obsessed with germs. We fear bacteria so much that we do everything we can to isolate ourselves from it, no matter the source. But when it comes to food, are we truly that delicate—unable to tolerate mud on our fingers or on the ground beneath our feet? Is our obsession reinforcing the binary vision that nature is dirty and dangerous, and human creations safe and clean? And what are we robbing ourselves of in the process?

Research published in Communications Psychology found that the more people interact with nature, the more fruits and vegetables they eat. While this affects us all, it disproportionately affects some of us more than others: Access to nature and socioeconomic and racial inequalities in U.S. urban areas have long been related. Simultaneously, the more urban the environment, the fewer healthy food choices are available—especially amongst Black and Hispanic communities, who often have less access to green spaces.

Community gardens and farmers markets help mitigate this gap. They also provide more affordable prices than grocery stores for organic and whole produce. I used to visit a community garden in Queens, where I learned how to compost and take care of the crops they had, allowing me to feel close to food again like I once did in Colombia. I have also tried to buy my produce in farmers markets that sell whole foods, rather than their chopped and sanitized counterparts. But access to these spaces is limited. Community gardens can’t produce the amount of food necessary to feed the whole city. Farmers markets are only in certain neighborhoods and on specific days a week, limiting access for working-class people. Not everyone has the privilege to eat spinach from the earth and not a bag.

I don’t have a solution to this disconnection. But I do know this: We understand the world through our senses. The feel of a vegetable in our hands, the smell of it, the taste, reminds us we exist because of the earth, what we feed ourselves comes from the earth, and that our cells are built from the earth, too. Our bodies evolved alongside the earth. Our ancestors touched soil, grew food, harvested crops, and fed their communities with their hands. And it seems likely for our collective wellbeing that we still need to do everything in our power to do the same.

[post_title] => Food is Meant to Be Touched [post_excerpt] => Over-processed produce is disconnecting us from where food comes from. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => food-groceries-united-states-colombia-produce-packed-pre-washed-cut-processed-gmo-ready-to-eat-fruits-vegetables-treatment [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-09-12 16:40:11 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-09-12 16:40:11 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=8823 [menu_order] => 10 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

September 9, 2025September 12, 2025

Food is Meant to Be Touched

by Ana María Betancourt Ovalle

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 9177 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-09-02 20:19:11 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-09-02 20:19:11 [post_content] =>

How one word has birthed a globe-spanning tradition of resistance.

A few months ago, I was at a protest in Washington, D.C. This was not unusual. Gaza burns. The president deports with impunity. Respect for the rule of law—notably and especially by the government—now seems like the nostalgic artifact of a more innocent era, an era merely months ago. Unsurprisingly, for those of us moved by these simultaneous horror shows, expressing our anger through protest has become almost unremarkable. I’ve lost count of the number of protests I’ve attended, the catchy homemade signs I’ve crafted and seen, and the clever chants I’ve memorized. But at that particular march, something unusual happened: a chant-leader exhorted us to cry a word in my mother tongue, Urdu.

“Azadi!” she called.

“Azadi!” the crowd responded in unison.

Suddenly, the word seemed everywhere: scrawled in chalk across sidewalks and columns; emblazoned across signs. In the heart of the nation, the seat of its power, everywhere, that old watchword of uprising—Azadi.

Azadi, or freedom, is a small word. A scant five letters in both English and its original Farsi (آزادی), these five letters have birthed a globe-spanning tradition of resistance, having been shouted by students in Srinagar and Tehran, whispered in prison cells in Ankara, and sung by women in Kashmir and Delhi. A cry familiar to all children of the Middle Eastern and South Asian diaspora, myself included, Azadi is hymn, music, and lifeline. It’s a demand for dignity from its callers and from all those who answer the call.

This demand is expansive in scope and depth, inclusive of the dignity of life, of identity, and of the ability to govern your own political destiny. Azadi evokes our collective memory that freedom is claimed, not given, while narrating a people’s unified struggle for systemic social change. For those who seek the protection of the most vulnerable while preserving the dignity of all, Azadi is always within reach.

Still, for all that Azadi is, we must be clear about what it is not. It is not a slogan to be selectively invoked. It is not a justification for state violence. Azadi cannot mean the protection of innocent life only when politically convenient. Moreover, it becomes meaningless when uttered by those who do not uphold a politics grounded in human dignity. Nowhere was this distinction starker than in a recent televised address, in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu briefly switched from English to Farsi while commenting on Israel’s bombing of Iran. “Women, life, freedom. Zan, zendagi, azadi,” he said—invoking the slogan of the Iranian women’s rights movement. In that moment, the language of liberation was co-opted to justify the machinery of war. It was surreal to hear a feminist chant—professed often by Iranian women defying authoritarian rule—repurposed by the very man overseeing the brutally indiscriminate bombing of thousands of women and girls in Gaza. The slogan, stripped of its radical roots and repurposed as rhetorical cover, stood in direct contradiction to the grassroots movements that had once breathed life into it.

Creeping autocracy in the United States has for too long been ignored and shrugged off as a dysfunction that happens only in the Middle East and elsewhere in the Global South—the lawless other. But this careless, arrogant posture can no longer be supported, nor can the dangers of autocracy be reduced to a foreign export; and so, Americans chant Azadi now, because America needs it now. The past 100+ days have exhibited what the marginalized in this country have always known: that the greatest repression within America’s borders remains homegrown. Despotism collapses the political distance between nations and times, and just as fascism is rising globally, it has risen here. The myth of American exceptionalism falsely preached that our democracy was immune to the spell of demagoguery. But we know that Americans are just as capable of voting themselves into tyranny as any other people. White supremacy, toxic masculinity, and violent inequalities in rights and liberties were always part of the country’s domestic architectures. Now, from the streets to digital silos, they are plain for all to witness.

From Hungary to India, Israel to the U.S., authoritarian regimes the world over are in conversation, looking admirably upon each other. They swap notes in class, sharing tactics of repression, like aggrandizing executive power and politicizing independent institutions. But just as authoritarian regimes learn from each other, so too must we build solidarity across movements. The rhymes of history—from the surveillance of Black radicals in the U.S. to the targeting of Kashmiri students in India—demand collective study. And along with any new lessons that may arise, we must continue to echo the lessons of some of our most beloved visionaries. From Angela Davis to Edward Said to Arundhati Roy, we are reminded that global resistance is strongest when deeply rooted in local struggle.

In fact, therein lies Azadi’s greatest power: It crosses borders, languages, and faiths, moving between nations without itself becoming nationalized. It is a global grammar of defiance.

Language lives. It breathes, grows, reproduces. Azadi has done so, too, absorbing every movement and tongue it touches: Farsi, Urdu, Kurdish, Pashto, Punjabi, English. The precise journey of the word is contested; after all, linguistic borrowing is never an isolated event. Still, it carries an expansive genealogy of struggle through its travels: against gendered violence, against settler colonialism, against religious nationalism.

While I heard cries for Azadi in D.C. for the first time this year, in Indian-occupied Kashmir—the most militarized zone on earth—Azadi has been invoked for decades, having been part of the Kashmiri liberation movement since its inception. Yet as Modi’s India forbids conversations about the region and brands it as sedition, as students and organizers are arrested for expressing their desire for freedom, as the indigenous Kashmiri struggle for self-determination persists—Azadi remains the movement’s heartbeat.

Long serving as the anthem of the Kashmiri separatist movement, now that Azadi can no longer be expressed in the open, it hides itself in art or in niche digital spaces not yet subject to state discipline. Digital speech, however, is increasingly policed. On platforms like X (formerly Twitter), Indian authorities now block, geofence, or suspend accounts that challenge its narrative. Content from advocacy groups like Stand With Kashmir is censored using the same tools of repression that platforms in the U.S. deploy against pro-Palestinian activists—algorithms, shadowbanning, keyword suppression. Surveillance and censorship, previously characterized as exclusive to so-called illiberal regimes, are now a feature of the liberal democracies just catching up.

As all this occurs, state actors escalate their repression of dissent in the United States. Trumpism has made it clear what can and cannot be said: speech critical of the Trump administration is met with swift retribution; and speech challenging domestic and foreign policy is quickly vilified, as seen by the vicious response to ICE protests in California earlier this summer. Meanwhile, students protesting for Palestine in the U.S. now face the same brutal state retaliation we’ve long associated with authoritarian regimes abroad—even though the U.S. has always had its own archive of violent suppression, from the surveillance and silencing of civil rights activists and abolitionists to the the crackdown on anti–Vietnam War protesters after them. Today, much to Trump’s delight, some of the most prestigious law firms have capitulated to executive pressure, agreeing to perform approximately $1 billion worth of pro-bono labor for Trump’s retributive pet projects. Activists and pro-Palestine advocates have been doxxed, fired, expelled, and/or blacklisted. All the while, institutional liberalism bends the knee: DEI offices that once promised safe harbor for marginalized voices now fall silent or side with power; liberal media outlets fire staff who speak out against atrocities in Gaza. The suppression of speech, criminalization of protest, surveillance of dissent—these are global patterns, and we are not exempt. Arguably, if American exceptionalism matters here at all, it will be in its ability to normalize this authoritarian bent worldwide.

And yet resistance continues. The same dignity Azadi rallies for abroad is now demanded here. On the steps of American universities. In its hallowed institutions. At the foot of the Capitol.

For all that Azadi gives, it demands something of us—namely that we do more than simply bear witness. When we chant Azadi, we are not just echoing other movements, past and present, but entering into dialogue with them, from Kashmir to Kabul to Tehran. This is not mimicry, but lineage, as Azadi reminds us in every generation that our rights are not guaranteed and must be renewed through struggle.

It is not enough, then, to be the appreciative, passive inheritor of a tradition of resistance; one must mobilize. This means texting rideshares, learning how to administer basic first aid for those whose names you don’t yet know, and tracking jail releases of those who you just met and marched alongside. This means disagreement without collapse, and accountability without exile. This means spending hours in rooms with bad lighting and too many opinions, trying to move toward consensus anyway.

If Azadi is to continue to mean something lasting, we’ll need to carry it beyond the chants—into policy fights, mutual aid networks, protective kinship, and more. Because Azadi is not metaphor, it is mandate, and requires all of us to answer its call.

Call and Response:

Hum kya chahte? Azadi!
What do we want? Freedom!

Chheen ke lenge—Azadi!
We will snatch it—Freedom!

Hai haq hamara—Azadi!
It is our right—Freedom!

Zor se bolo—Azadi!
Say it louder—Freedom!

Hai jaan se pyaari—Azadi!
We love it more than life—Freedom!

Tum kuch bhi kar lo, hum leke rahenge—Azadi!
Do what you want, we will still win it—Freedom!

[post_title] => America Needs Azadi [post_excerpt] => How one word has birthed a globe-spanning tradition of resistance. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => america-united-states-azadi-freedom-protest-palestine-gaza [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-09-03 10:27:10 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-09-03 10:27:10 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=9177 [menu_order] => 4 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

September 2, 2025September 3, 2025

America Needs Azadi

by Safiyah Zaidi

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 9098 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-08-01 17:42:22 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-08-01 17:42:22 [post_content] =>

As immigrants, my friends and I depend on each other in ways I've never needed back home.

“Old Friends” is an ongoing series exploring the many ways that friendship changes shape in adulthood.

For months, I thought coming to New York City was a mistake. I’d accepted an unpaid internship in the city, leaving my home in Bogota to try living abroad. I dreamed of going to Broadway shows, dining out at different restaurants—enjoying all the fun New York had to offer. But instead, in addition to my internship, I ended up taking another job, just to afford rent. I worked sixteen hours a day, six days a week, with little time to socialize. I was burned out and deeply lonely. Then, one day, my friend Carolina suggested we go out after our internship and do something fun.

“We should go rollerskating at Rockefeller Center,” she said.

I used to skate for fun back in Colombia—my home country—when I was a teenager, but hadn’t gone in years. Still, I thought it was a great idea. Carolina was a talented skater, and we had so much fun looping around the rink that I was reminded of the joy skating had once made me feel.

For the first time in months, I was completely at ease. Then, as we were leaving the rink, I fell. When I looked down, my arm was shaped like the letter “s”: I’d broken my left wrist. Carolina, somehow, found the strength to pull me up, call an Uber, and take me to the nearest hospital. She waited with me for hours in the emergency room, where I learned I’d need nails and a cast to fix my broken bones.

As my arm healed, Carolina took the subway with me to work every day, protecting me from accidental bumps. She brushed my messy hair, pulled down my pants so I could pee, and dressed me up again; all things I’m not sure I’d ask even my closest friends to do for me back home.

At the time, we had only known each other for four months.

I once read an Instagram post that said being an immigrant is like becoming a dog: one year as an immigrant equals seven years of life experience. Friendships, then, become intense and profound more quickly than they might back home. Sometimes, out of necessity, they become deeper than our friendships back home, too.

Adult immigrants often find themselves profoundly alone. Our families and closest friends usually remain in our home countries, hundreds or even thousands of miles away. The friendships we form in our new lives, then, become everything to us: our support network, our first call, our emergency contacts.

In an unfamiliar city, we also seek familiarity. As immigrants, we tend to connect more deeply with people from similar cultural backgrounds, something especially meaningful when we suddenly become the “other” after a lifetime of living in a country where we are the “norm.” Sharing a language, traditions, and social cues lowers the barriers to intimacy: When someone understands the way you were raised, you don’t have to justify or over-explain everything you do.

Carolina was from Bogota, too, and had started at the same internship a week before I had. We had a lot in common: We both came from Catholic-conservative backgrounds, needed to be very mature at a young age, identified as feminists, had issues making friends, and wanted to start life from scratch in the city. We shared similar experiences growing up, and similar experiences since coming to New York. But our friendship deepened after I broke my wrist: I knew then that we could rely on one another. That if something ever happened to me again, she would take care of me—and if something ever happened to her, I’d take care of her, too.

Carolina isn’t the only immigrant friend I’ve felt this immediate intimacy with. One day, I was hiking with Nicol, a Peruvian friend. The trail was rocky and we had to march in rhythm just to move forward. Suddenly, a memory popped into my head: In primary school, I used to march like a soldier with the rest of my classmates. Military culture is deeply ingrained in Colombia because of our near century-long history of war and internal armed conflict. It felt silly, but I decided to share my memory with Nicol.

“Oh, yeah, we did that at my school, too,” she said. “It was so ridiculous. Our parents would come watch us march in squared formations.”

Of course. Peru, too, has a history of armed conflict, and military culture was a part of her primary school indoctrination as well. She didn’t make fun of me for what I thought might be a strange confession. Instead, she took my memory and treated it with care—turning it into something funny and shared.

I immediately felt closer to her, something unusual for me. I’ve always considered myself introverted. During my undergrad years in Colombia, I experienced severe social anxiety. I was trapped in an internal monologue that told me I was boring, strange, and hard to love. For nearly two years, I didn’t make a single friend. I built high walls around myself that kept everyone out. After a while, I made meaningful connections that have stayed with me, but I’d never found it easy.

When I migrated, I assumed I’d again struggle to make friends—especially since, on top of everything else, I now had to add “not fluent enough in English” to my long list of self-demeaning adjectives.

But when I started grad school in the States, I made friends within the first two weeks. At the time, I thought maybe I had changed somehow; become more at ease within myself, more confident. But looking back, I can see it was something else: My deep, human need to belong—and the comfort I felt around other Latin American students—had activated parts of me that had been frozen.

A couple of weeks ago, I spent the afternoon with María, a friend from Mexico. Before coming here, I had never had friends like her—extroverted, party lovers, heavy users of dating apps, full of energy. After a long conversation about how Latina diet culture has shaped our relationship to food and our bodies, I realized our friendship had grown strong, in spite of our differences, because it was rooted in something larger than us. Like with Carolina, and Nicol, and countless other immigrant friends, we were united by our need to resist a homogenizing environment. We were united by our shared confusion about U.S. social cues. We were united by our warmth, our humor, and our overlapping memories, even if we didn’t grow up in the same country.

“I’ve noticed you’re literally like my younger sister,” she told me. “The good girl who wants to fit in and carries the weight of your lineage. We’re very different, but there’s a strong emotional connection between us.” I realized then that she is, indeed, a lot like my older sister, too.

I’ve been in the U.S. for almost two years now, and I still find it hard to make American friends. Sometimes, people make xenophobic comments to me in the streets. When I meet people who grew up in the States, I quickly find myself running out of conversation topics, unable to find much common ground—something that still makes me feel out of place. But my immigrant friends are part of the reason I still want to stay, to put down roots.

At the end of the day, home is where you feel safe, loved, and cared for, rather than where you grew up. If I have friends who look after me, who resist the harshest expressions of discrimination and exclusion by my side—then here, I’ve found a place to call home.

Don’t get me wrong: I have beautiful, loyal friendships in Colombia, too. But my friends there don’t need me to survive. In Colombia, if I got sick, I could call my parents or sisters, and they would drop everything for me. But there, I had never been anyone’s emergency contact. My friends back home already had someone else to call—their own parents, siblings, partners.

In contrast, my friendships in New York became lifelong within months. I’m now the emergency contact for two friends. I’ve been the caregiver for one of them coming out of a medical procedure that needed anesthesia. Here, my friends and I depend on each other to be each other’s version of family, to be a shoulder to cry on, to be someone reliable for medicine delivery; as a party plus-one, a caregiver, a babysitter (or cat sitter!), among many other things.

The need to survive, to resist, to belong, and to be comforted—that’s what first pushed us together. But it’s the care, love, and familiarity that’s kept us bonded.

[post_title] => Emergency Contact [post_excerpt] => As immigrants, my friends and I depend on each other in ways I've never needed back home. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => immigrant-friendships-migrant-friends-relationships-home-emergency-contacts-shared-language-culture-latin-america-immigration-personal-essay [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-09-12 16:43:09 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-09-12 16:43:09 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=9098 [menu_order] => 3 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

August 1, 2025September 12, 2025

Emergency Contact

by Ana María Betancourt Ovalle

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How younger generations are turning knitting and crochet into a community building affair.

The first known knitted project was a pair of socks. Discovered in Egypt, the socks featured colorwork made from indigo and white cotton, and were believed to date back to the 11th century, although the craft itself has likely existed for much longer. In the many decades since, knitting, crochet, and other fiber arts have become widespread and global, evolving from the work of artisans to a beloved pastime across generations, while still staying true to the original techniques used in the very first woven fabrics. And now, the craft has evolved once more—this time, at the hands of young people seeking a comforting hobby that gets them out of the house.

This is what led Virginia Meinhausen, 28, and Lea Engler, 31, to take the leap and start Knitting Club Potsdam in Germany earlier this year. “Being part of a community in person is something [meaningful], not only just to speak to each other, it's also… Wow, so many people are doing this and we are doing this together,” says Meinhausen. “We are now meeting each other in a huge group once a month.”

Since launching the club in March, Meinhausen says it’s grown to over 100 members. But this quick success isn’t unique to just Knitting Club Potsdam. In recent years, the age-old practice has found new meaning amongst Gen Z and Millennials, who have turned to knitting as a means of bringing back the “third place” and reconnecting with their peers.

“I remember thinking, it’s crazy how many people don’t have a real hobby anymore,” says Isabelle Mann, textile business expert and owner of knitwear brand Fable and Failure. But she says this started to shift during the pandemic, as younger generations sought more analog ways to pass the time.

The trend first began online, rising to prominence through influencers like Petite Knit and platforms like Ravelry, with younger generations taking ancient techniques and adapting their garments and patterns to match modern trends. “People do appreciate knitting more again,” Mann says. She sees fiber arts as a community building affair for those between 25 and 35, and started her own club through her business in 2019 as a means of teaching and preserving the craft. She also believes that fiber arts skipped a generation, and that parents in the 90s and early 2000s simply never taught their Millennial and Gen Z children how to do it. Instead, these generations taught themselves—and eventually, as COVID lockdowns lifted, these same knitters decided it was time to take things offline.

Craving human interaction and a break from their screens, hobbyists began coming together post-pandemic as a means of bringing back the “third place”: a neutral, physical space separate from home and work (or school). The concept is set on community building in-person, without having to spend much or any money to participate—something Gen Z feels that they’ve missed out on, and Millennials frequently mourn, as social media has increasingly replaced it online.

Knitting clubs, in particular, have gained global interest in recent years, with communities expanding rapidly, even in small cities. The industry is expected to grow by $10.69 billion between 2024 and 2028, according to Technavio, a company that specializes in market research reports and industry analysis.

In addition to creating bonds through a like interest, in-person knitting clubs are also helping young fiber artists learn new techniques faster and more effectively. When they began Knitting Club Potsdam, Meinhausen was a beginner and Engler was a seasoned knitter, having learned from her mother starting at 8 years old. The club currently has 60% beginner knitters and 40% advanced, according to Engler. Meinhausen, still a beginner herself, says she can’t believe the intricate project she’s working on now, which she credits to how quickly she’s learned since starting the club. She adds that advanced members “love to help,” which gives those just starting out the confidence to continue attending—and makes everyone joyful in the process.

Quote is good

“I told Gini [Virginia] after the first meeting, for me, it was very calm. Everyone was smiling. Everyone [was] so, so happy,” Engler says. “I think this feeling is the best part.”

According to Meinhausen and Engler, knitting and crochet is very popular amongst young people in Germany, but the hobby has gained traction amongst 20- and 30-somethings in other places, as well. In New York, crochet designer Michelle Palacio is creating garments for her brand Venganza using crochet techniques from her Colombian grandmother. In Nepal, the Nepal KnotCraft Centre, founded in 1984, aims to help women of all ages build traditional skills in fiber arts. In Paris, Avril Bas, 26, and her co-president Alice Pierre-François, 28, launched a crochet club called Club Crochet Tricot in 2024, a club that is now officially recognized by the French government. She says membership is growing every week.

“It's really incredible to have [this] place where a common hobby links people, and it helps us find similarly minded people that want to [enjoy] the same activities,” Bas says. “It's really beautiful.”

Bas says that starting the club, combined with her passion for knitting and crochet, contributed to her pursuing fiber arts full time. She fell in love with the tight-knit nature of the community, and now, their club’s efforts have “blossomed into something massive.”

“I started this club and all of a sudden I had like quadrupled my number of friends,” she says.

Club Crochet Tricot meets on Sundays four times a month, with locations varying from scenic park picnics, local cafes, public libraries, and even the cinema. Between 40 and 100 people regularly attend their in-person crafting sessions, and there are always new and interested attendees week to week. Bas feels like younger generations long for this kind social interaction, building community around creativity—and her club is an outlet for that. She also says that she’s more than happy to be a “third place” for those who have been seeking it—and perhaps, that it’s a sign of more “third places” to come.

“Everybody around our age wants to open a bookstore, plant store, cafe,” Bas says. “I feel like it’s going to happen.”

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July 28, 2025September 19, 2025

Weaving a New Third Place

by Andriana Kourkoumelis

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A few unconventional beach reads from the Conversationalist team.

Trauma Plot: A Life by Jamie Hood

Part memoir, part literary criticism, part autofiction, part therapy diary, and totally all-consuming, Jamie Hood's Trauma Plot considers how rape upends subjectivity, narrative, and identity — and, in more personal terms, what it means to build a life that acknowledges the reality of sexual violence while refusing to be defined by it. Structurally, it's one of the most interesting books I've read in years; emotionally, it's one of the most gripping. It's searing and surprisingly funny, both brilliant and deeply intimate. And though its subject matter is dark, Hood's a gifted stylist who writes with a powerful spirit of hopefulness and solidarity. I found Trauma Plot utterly unforgettable.

—Marissa Lorusso

Skin and Bones by Renée Watson

I started reading Skin and Bones by Renée Watson at the top of the year, a Christmas gift from a friend. The premise follows a woman, Lena, who is set to get married when her fiancé divulges a secret the day of their wedding. The book is about heartbreak and forgiveness and how relationships evolve. It's about friendships, motherhood, and multigenerational hurts, lessons, and loves. But even more, it's about the dynamics, social and political, of being a fat, black woman in the U.S.; specifically within historical and present black Portland.

I didn't know what to expect from Skin and Bones, though I'd been a bit familiar with Watson's poetry. Like her poetry, her pose is soulful, and the story keeps you wanting to know more and more and more, so much so that by the end, I still wanted to know more about the main character Lena and the world she existed in. However conscientious I may consider myself now about the politics of fatness, there's so much nuance in the book Watson offers through Lena's story, and I'm appreciative of the insight given that I didn't know; that perhaps I could not have easily known.

All in all, the book is both informative and heartfelt, and whatever time of year you read it in, it's sure to deliver warmth to your skin—and bones.

—Kovie Biakolo

Alligator Tears: A Memoir in Essays by Edgar Gomez

From working at a bougie flip-flop store to Latin dance nights at Pulse nightclub, Edgar Gomez's Alligator Tears is an ode to Florida and queerness. As someone who also grew up in Florida, I saw so much of myself in Gomez's story. His book made me laugh, cry, and feel less alone. The writing is so raw; it's a refreshing dive into the deep end of some topics that are rarely discussed with such honesty. (Just be warned that in the deep end, you may find some alligators lurking.)

—Kiera Wright-Ruiz

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty

I've been reading a lot of escapist fantasy to cope with current events, and this novel about Amina al-Sirafi, a retired pirate who gets sucked back into sailing the medieval Indian Ocean in search of a kidnapped kid and ancient, magical treasures, was the most fun I've had with a book of late. It's also especially unusual to find middle-aged mothers as fantasy protagonists, and it reminded me of another favorite, N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy. Even better, the book is set up to become a series, which means more adventures to come.

—Anna Lind-Guzik

Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li

Early in her memoir Things in Nature Merely Grow, Yiyun Li writes, “Facts are the harshest and the hardest part of life." Yet it is the sturdiness of facts, "unalterable," that the writer finds herself returning to in the aftermath of immeasurable loss: the deaths of both her children by suicide, six years apart.

Li writes about the abyss of grief, aware that she is still in it, and perhaps always will be. Things in Nature Merely Grow is Li’s book for her younger son James, a boy who lived life through his thoughts, and it is therefore led by logic; exploring how we think about, talk about, and rationalize death, suicide, and grief. This isn’t to say the book abandons feeling—far from it—but rather that Li’s feelings are almost always tethered to facts: Each moment she catches herself on the cliff’s edge of a hypothetical, she steps away, knowing no answer will change her reality.

A deeply generous book, this memoir flowed through me. It’s staggering to read something that so deftly addresses how impossible it is to put grief into words while doing it so masterfully. Yet here, Li’s writing is precise, capturing grief’s abyss with unwavering clarity.

—Gina Mei

Not Your Rescue Project: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice by Chanelle Gallant and Elene Lam

As a sex worker and a writer, I’m constantly on the lookout for that rare text that covers adult industry workers with nuance, accuracy, and cultural competence. Not Your Rescue Project: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice, written by sex worker advocates Chanelle Gallant and Elene Lam, is one such uncommon text. Published last year, this timely book balances workers’ personal narratives with a play-by-play breakdown of the historical and contemporary jigsaw puzzle of racist and sexist policy, stigma, and violence that plagues migrant sex workers in North America. Many people outside the sex industry don’t understand how anti-sex worker stigma affects them personally, and I’m always excited when I find a piece of media that connects the dots in a way that’s easy to understand. Not Your Rescue Project accurately situates migrant sex work as a global justice issue about gender and labor, and every page is a well-researched argument for why anyone who wants to end patriarchy would benefit from joining the fight for migrant sex workers’ rights.

—Delilah Saul

Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

The novel is written with simple language, but I read each page slowly, because every sentence contains meaning and emotion. This is the story of Catalina and her grandparents, an undocumented Ecuadorian family living in Queens, New York. From a young age, Catalina feels the fear and pressure of living in the States without a visa. When she graduates from high school, she begins studying at Harvard—her family’s great dream for her. But as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that attending such an institution won't necessarily fulfill the promise of solidifying her immigration status, nor give her family the upward mobility they'd long hoped for.

Faced with the impossibility of telling her own story, Catalina finds a way to claim space by deciding to become art—because then, she would be seen, and admired, and perhaps even able to legalize her immigration status. After all, a recognized work of art can freely come and go, without needing visas.

Unlike other common portrayals of immigrants in pop culture, Cornejo Villavicencio’s novel does not portray immigrants as victims. Rather, it asserts a claim: Immigrants want to be seen, and have the right to joy.

—Ana María Betancourt Ovalle

Coach Prime: Deion Sanders and the Making of Men by Jean-Jacques Taylor

This book spoke to me on so many levels. Coach Prime is more than a story about football—it’s a deep, intimate look into what it means to lead with integrity, faith, and fearlessness in a world that often misunderstands or underestimates you. Deion Sanders, known for his illustrious NFL career, emerges here not just as a coach, but as a transformational leader, mentor, and father figure who guides young men through life’s toughest moments with purpose and poise.

In an era where diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts are often under attack or dismissed, Sanders' approach also offers a compelling and deeply needed counter-narrative: He doesn’t just preach inclusion—he lives it, modeling how authenticity and high standards can coexist. Rather than lower the bar to accommodate struggle, he lifts people up so they can reach it.

Personally, this book has challenged me to lead with greater intentionality, to show up more consistently in my purpose, and to be a source of confidence and clarity for others. I’ve taken away this truth: Real leadership isn’t about being loud—it’s about being rooted. Others can learn from this book that greatness isn’t found in performance alone—it’s in how you treat people, how you guide them, and how you hold space for others to grow. That’s how we build lasting impact—not just on the field, but in every part of our lives.

—Loleta Ross

The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life by Suleika Jaouad

As a lifelong journaler, I’ve been relishing each page of The Book of Alchemy by Suleika Jaouad. Even if you don’t journal (or aspire to but haven’t made it a ritual—yet!), it’s a beautiful collection of 100 essays from deep thinkers and wisdom gatherers that you can flip through and digest at your own speed. I love that each essay is short, only a few pages; which means I can manage to finish one at bedtime before falling asleep. Each essay ends with a prompt for journaling, a friendly hand reaching out to you to help make the habit a little more inviting and doable. It continues to surprise me how a journal (or just any ole notebook, really) can instantly become a safe space and listening ear for what’s swimming inside of you and wants to be released. A free form of therapy that’s available whenever you need it. Thank you Suleika for unlocking the magical world of journaling that’s awaiting all of us!

—Erin Zimmer Strenio

[post_title] => What We're Reading This Summer
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July 14, 2025September 12, 2025

What We’re Reading This Summer

by The Conversationalist Team

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How Kenya's grocery stores might be hurting local farmers.

When the Mauritian private equity fund, Adenia Capital IV, bought Kenyan supermarket chain Quickmart and merged it with rival Tumaimi in 2019, the benefits to investors were obvious. Under the terms, all 13 Tumaimi stores in Kenya would rebrand as Quickmarts, making it the third-largest supermarket chain in Kenya by number of stores overnight. In a joint statement, the two supermarket chains said this new entity would “enhance the capacity to accelerate expansion” and bolster “operational efficiencies.” With an influx of capital, the expanded Quickmart was also poised to buy up smaller stores around the country and become an even larger retail powerhouse, extending its operations beyond dense shopping areas and into quieter residential areas on the periphery of Kenya’s major cities.

Beyond lower prices and expanded access, Quickmart and its private equity owner also spoke of social advantages for ordinary Kenyans. At the time of the merger, 14,000 farmers across the country supplied the chain. With time, Quickmart expected them to supply about 30 percent of its fresh produce. In a country where an estimated 40 percent of people derive at least some of their income from agriculture, the promise of more opportunities for farmers looked like a benefit for everyone.

Since exploding onto the scene in the early 2000s, there’s been a steady rise in supermarkets across Kenya. In 2002, there were four supermarket chains in the country; by 2018, there were ten. Though more “informal” operations, like market stalls, still account for the vast majority of Kenyan grocery sales, in 2020, the proportion of groceries sold through supermarkets was as high as 15 percent. By the end of the decade, such “modern retailers” could account for as much as 25 percent of sales, according to a report from Boston Consulting Group.

It’s a similar story across the developing world, where supermarkets are rapidly displacing other retailers to become the place of choice to buy food. In doing so, supermarkets have become a major force in the Global South, not just in retailing, but in agricultural purchasing. But a closer look shows the new phenomenon has often done more harm than good for the small farmers these supermarket chains and their investors claim to help.

Well into the 20th century, buying groceries in the United States was a lot like buying them in many parts of Africa today: Different vendors sold different items, like meat, produce, oil, or rice, independently, but in close proximity.

As journalist Benjamin Lorr explains in his book, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket, the idea of a big store that sells everything in one place only goes back a century. Michael Cullen, the New Jersey grocer who pioneered the supermarket concept, struggled and failed to persuade colleagues about its viability for years. But when he opened his King Kullen store—the first supermarket in history—in New York in 1930, the Great Depression was raging, and the store’s wide range of heavily discounted offerings quickly proved indispensable to legions of customers. Other stores soon followed.

“They came with names like Big Bear, Giant Tiger, Bull Market, Great Leopard, announcing their size and price-chopping ferocity with a zoological zeal that puzzles the modern ear,” Lorr writes. “Adding in-store mascots and costumes, parades and pullout advertisements, each trying to pile up merchandise into ever higher displays of abundance.”

By the 1960s, virtually every new grocery store in America was a supermarket, and regional and national chains like Safeway and Kroger became household names throughout the country. Since big supermarkets meant big parking lots, people could also bring their cars—by then an indispensable part of modern life. And because these stores offered everything in one place, families could load up for the week in a single transaction.

Size came with a cost advantage, both for stores and for customers. By buying so much food at once, supermarkets could insist on lower prices from farmers, then sell it to consumers for less than their smaller competitors, thus drawing more people and fueling their own expansion.

But the supermarkets’ edge was often their suppliers’ curse. Dealing with a big supermarket chain meant farmers could sell vast amounts of their products, but it also made them beholden to them. Some farmers got by under this new regime by adapting the stores’ model for themselves, consolidating with each other, getting bigger, and selling at volume to make up for the smaller margins on each item. More often, however, farmers went out of business entirely.

In developing countries today, farmers are facing a similar threat. As a report from the African Climate Foundation recently found, rising supermarket chains typically impose burdensome costs onto farmers in the form of “fees, terms and supply conditions” that only the very largest farmers can endure.

In Kenya, smaller farmers are already suffering. In 2016, the Competitive Authority of Kenya (CAK), a government agency formed to regulate market competition, found that a number of supermarkets had abused their power by pressing new fees onto suppliers after signing contracts. Soon after, Kenya became only the second country in Africa, after South Africa, to prohibit such abuses in legislation.

Kenya and South Africa’s relative affluence may distinguish them from most countries in Africa, but, as supermarkets spread across the continent, they offer a warning of how supermarkets can harm farmers, even with regulations in place. In 2023, CAK hit the local operators of Carrefour, a French supermarket chain, with a record $8.5 million fine after concluding that the chain had climbed the ranks in Kenya’s supermarket industry by demanding crushing discounts from suppliers with one hand, while promoting impossibly low prices to consumers with the other. Carrefour has said it will appeal the decision, but it’s not the first time the company and its local partners have been accused of harming a supplier. A few years earlier, CAK ruled against Carrefour’s local operators after a Kenyan yogurt producer, Orchards, argued it had been forced to give Carrefour steep discounts and even free merchandise that the supermarket later turned around and sold.

Kenya’s high court upheld the ruling last year. By then, Orchards had already gone out of business.

You might think consumer demand is the sole driving force behind the rise in supermarkets in the Global South. It’s true that in Kenya and other developing countries, an emergent class of consumers has come to expect the same luxuries that people in the United States and Europe have long enjoyed. But the worldwide shift towards supermarkets isn’t just a free market trend: It’s aided by a heavy hand from taxpayers in the Global North.

When Adenia Capital IV purchased Quickmart in 2019, more than 40 percent of the fund’s €230 million came from government-controlled development finance institutions. Development banks from Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany all contributed, as well, along with two multilateral banks—the International Finance Corporation (IFC), part of the World Bank Group, and the European Investment Bank, the European Union’s development bank.

Similar taxpayer-funded institutions underwrite supermarkets all over the developing world. In the last two years alone, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, another development bank, has invested in supermarket chains in Uzbekistan, Romania, Turkey, Albania, and elsewhere. In 2025, the IFC promised up to $30 million to help Kazyon, an Egyptian chain, expand in Morocco. Two years before, Kazyon also received $165 million from Development Partners International, a private equity fund backed by development banks from France and the UK.

European development banks are typically mandated to use their capital to alleviate poverty in developing countries, and often justify investments in supermarkets as a means of helping women and “modernizing” agricultural economies. Consider the Netherlands’ development bank, FMO, which provided $23 million to Azerbaijan’s Araz Supermarket in 2024 to help it build a new distribution facility. FMO said the investment would “contribute to gender equality” since Araz employed a number of women. The bank also said it would help Araz provide “modern working conditions” in a poor region of the country.

But despite investors’ claims, history has shown that the rise and consolidation of supermarkets is usually also bad news for small farmers. Development banks may tout an altruistic mission, but the supermarkets appeal to them for the same reason they appeal to commercial banks: not because they support local agriculture or gender equality, but because they are reliable investments. What benefits they provide to rural communities is less important than whether they grow and turn a profit.

One way to make conditions more equitable for farmers is to implement regulations that dictate what supermarkets can and cannot do to suppliers. Since 2010, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand have adopted mandatory codes that bar grocers from practices like changing the terms of a supplier contract unilaterally or delaying payments to suppliers. In Africa, two countries—Kenya and Namibia—have adopted similar codes; though, for now, adherence is voluntary. That’s an inherent weakness: As the African Climate Foundation notes—and as Kenya’s recent history of supermarket-supplier relations has demonstrated—true change requires enforcement.

Development banks could also play a role in obliging countries to adopt these stronger regulations. By promising to invest in supermarkets only in countries that have adopted mandatory codes of conduct, a bank like the IFC could ensure its capital does more to help than harm the small farmers—not just in Africa, but in developing countries around the world—on whose labor agricultural economies depend.

[post_title] => The Troubling Rise of Supermarkets in the Global South [post_excerpt] => How Kenya's grocery stores might be hurting local farmers. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => kenya-global-south-african-supermarkets-quikmart-private-equity-fund-development-banks-food-groceries [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-09-12 16:54:56 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-09-12 16:54:56 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=8835 [menu_order] => 8 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

July 10, 2025September 12, 2025

The Troubling Rise of Supermarkets in the Global South

by Alex Park

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Why I became more subscription-conscious (and you should, too).

Soapbox is a series where people make the case for the sometimes surprising things they feel strongly about.

In my junior year of college, I wound up with a free subscription to a bunch of magazines, including Real Simple. To this day, I have no idea how it happened, and if my bank account or credit card had been charged at the time, I would have remembered. But it wasn’t. So, even though I hadn’t paid for them, for much of that school year, magazines would show up in my mailbox; and apart from Real Simple, I’d mostly ignore the rest. Unable to remember any other analog subscriptions prior—even if this one was free—we’ll say this was my first. Not one that belonged to my parents, siblings, or friends, that I might have made use of, but one that was truly mine. This was 15 years ago.

Post-college, I briefly lived with my brother and benefited from all his subscriptions, many of them digital. When I eventually began graduate school and moved out, I would acquire my own first digital subscriptions, too—although these, I actually signed up and paid for. Back then and soon after, the $9.99 for Spotify and $7.99 for Netflix didn’t feel like chump change, although it didn’t exactly break the bank. Either way, both seemed like a good deal. At least, a better deal than the price iTunes charged for individual songs and albums, and the cost of renting or buying individual movies from a store, or paying for cable.

It’s been over a decade since I completed graduate school, and since then, in addition to my first two digital subscriptions (and my unintentional first magazine subscriptions), I’ve at some point or another (and quite frankly, altogether) been subscribed to Hulu, HBO Max, Disney+, Peacock, Paramount+, Tidal, various print and digital magazines and newspapers, multiple money managing and investing apps, CitiBike, Uber One, Zoom, YouTube Premium, Amazon Prime (#judgeaway), HUM vitamins, and more. This is all without mentioning the endless products I’ve bought online then temporarily and periodically subscribed to, whenever they’ve offered a discount for doing so.

It’s an excessive and exhaustive list, but in my defense, having studied and then covered culture, some of these subscriptions were for work, and the cost was either free for a time or could at least be counted as expenses for my taxes. Others were arguably also because of work due to having less time to myself; during certain periods in my life, hunting for home goods in a store just didn’t seem like a good use of my time when I could just search for them on a database and have them delivered to my door.

At a certain point, however, I gradually began to realize something much more fundamental had been lost in all the “convenience” I’d been paying for. I was becoming less conscientious of how my choices were not just directly affecting my physical locale, but the people who live and work in it. Sure, in theory, I said I valued my neighbors, residents and businesses alike, but I’d make critiques about the changing neighborhood (“there goes the neighborhood!”) without implicating myself in those changes. More thoughtful and purposeful encounters with my community had been sacrificed at my altar of convenience.

So, I began to unsubscribe, unsubscribe, unsubscribe.

Looking back, my subscription-ending journey—or perhaps more accurately, subscription-consciousness journey—was a product, at least in part, of post-COVID lockdown reflections on what I really need and how I’d really like to spend my time. The excess of my subscriptions had started to feel akin to hoarding, and I needed to clear space, even if most of that space was intangible. There was also the lightbulb realization that has become more and more common amongst Millennials, that, despite our monthly investments in accessing various forms of media, we don’t actually own most of the culture that we consume. What’s more, should the companies that do own that media go defunct or be sold to entities that we may prefer not to do business with, we really wouldn’t have much recourse—except to unsubscribe.

This could mean years and years of playlists and TV shows and films that we would no longer have access to because they were never really ours to begin with, ultimately leaving us with nothing. And while I’m not interested in owning many things from culture, save for books and some fashions, I do think ownership of culture in its various forms serves more than capitalistic desire. Our things can be physical memories of what we love or once did, what has been passed on and gifted to us, and sometimes, reminders of what we saved and scraped for—emblems of hard-fought earnings. We are robbed of this when we choose to rent something out of convenience or compulsion instead of mindfully acquiring things that are truly meaningful to us.

We also aren’t the only ones both literally and figuratively footing the bill for our abundance of subscriptions: The obvious, of course, is that small, local businesses pay the ultimate price for our overreliance on the monopolies cannibalizing our choices. There’s an impersonal, persistent transactional relationship that develops when you constantly have things delivered to you via third parties. It’s not your favorite delivery person from your favorite Jamaican spot; it’s just the person that first picked up the order who you’ll likely never see again. It’s not the local hardware store owner that understands which tools work best for your apartment because they know other people in your building dealing with the same problem; it’s you endlessly scrolling through the best reviewed or highest quality or cheapest options online, hoping the tools you’ve chosen will get the job done. It’s missing out on a discount from the owner of the neighborhood craft and candle store—who unbeknownst to too many others, can also act as a notary—and choosing a digital coupon over a beautiful reminder that you’re part of a community.

Moreover, overconsumption inevitably leads to resource depletion, and in this brave new world where the latest AI technology permeates everything we do (sometimes against our will), even the climate-conscious among us are contributing to it negatively. Binge-watching or binging-anything-digital also has adverse health effects, including on our mental health and sleep, and we’re yet to fully grasp all of its socio-psychological effects, not to mention its contribution to our loneliness and isolation crises.

When I think about the last 15 years of subscribing—and lately, unsubscribing—I’ve had to admit that like many of us who live during this time, I sacrificed more convenience for less community, ownership of important things for access to seemingly everything, and gave my contact information to a bunch of companies whose aim is to profile my habits and patterns with little care for how my day is going. Unlike my favorite delivery person at my favorite Jamaican spot, who never fails to ask.

Today, I don’t have as many subscriptions as I once did, and for different reasons. I downgraded or fully got rid of some streaming services because I didn’t watch them enough and I felt the value didn’t match the price—especially as prices have hiked significantly in the last few years. My short stint with CitiBike was because quite frankly, I’m more of a walker and a subway rider—and I’ve accepted once again that biking regularly for transportation is just not something I enjoy. Meanwhile, while I’ve kept some print literature, I’ve ended other subscriptions or kept them as digital-only because they were starting to need their own storage space in my home—and I couldn’t lend or donate them fast enough. And of course, with subscriptions like Amazon Prime, I decided I could no longer live with the cognitive dissonance of having it while being opposed to its labor politics and the politics of its owner. (Unfortunately, this has also meant ending a more than decade-long affair with Whole Foods, which I unashamedly enjoyed as much as the farmer’s market I still frequent.)

I don’t think I’ll ever be subscription-free. I still have Netflix, and although Tidal had replaced Spotify in my life for many years due to its higher-quality sound, I missed my old playlists and collaborations on the latter and decided it’s one excess I can live with for now. But I’ve also returned to collecting vinyl again, shopping for most things in-person, and living with things taking as long as they need to get to me if I do order them online. Putting an end to the mindless and endless subscribing has made me more mindful of the things that I do want showing up in my digital and physical mailbox once a month. Because unlike 15 years ago with that accidental analog subscription, I’m making a conscious choice for them to be there.

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June 25, 2025September 12, 2025

Unsubscribe, Unsubscribe, Unsubscribe

by Kovie Biakolo

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 8523 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-06-23 21:38:31 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-06-23 21:38:31 [post_content] =>

And it'll make you feel alive, too.

Soapbox is a series where people make the case for the sometimes surprising things they feel strongly about.

A few months ago, I found myself openly crying in the office. I wasn’t crying about something personal, or even something particularly emotionally complex. I also wasn’t crying over the usual slate of workplace drama (bad meetings, good news, big decisions, encroaching deadlines, staffing cuts, etc.), which I’ve admittedly cried about a million times before. No, this time was different: I was crying because I was streaming the Boston Marathon at my desk, and—after 26 miles, all of them occurring hundreds of miles away from the city where I work—the lead women were approaching the finish line.

If the idea of crying over running sounds insane to you, or if the prospect of spending several hours in front of a screen watching strangers run sounds like watching paint dry: I get it. Until a few years ago, the very idea of long-distance running as a professional sport that people followed and spectated was entirely foreign to me. Having grown up in Massachusetts, I was aware that Marathon Monday was a meaningful day for the city; but for me, it mostly meant that work and school would be canceled, lots of roads would be closed, and maybe some friends would be going to cheer their friends on while I enjoyed the day off. I felt no more emotionally invested in the race and its outcome than in a 4th of July parade. Going out of my way to watch a race happening in a different city, then, would never have occurred to me; it would have felt like closely following municipal elections in a city I’d never visit.

But over the last few years, I’ve come to believe that spectating marathons is one of the most beautiful, life-affirming ways we can spend our time. Before I got into watching races, I’d never been a serious fan of any sport. I’ve long been a casual runner, who initially got into the sport out of a vague, begrudging sense of obligation to “fitness.” But then, I made friends who competed in—and sometimes even won!—local races, and who truly adored running on its own merits. Their enthusiasm got me hooked: When they sent me a pro runner’s Instagram post, I’d hit “follow”; when they wanted to watch a race, I’d stream it, too. Whenever we spectated together, they’d point out how everyone racing was quite literally on equal footing—what other sport, they’d ask, has total newbies and elite lifers competing in the same place, at the same time? Not to mention that races aren’t hard to follow. Unlike, say, baseball or football, whose fandoms seem to mandate memorizing reams of stats and plays, marathons have precious few rules to remember: Generally speaking, the first person to the finish line wins, making it incredibly accessible for both the casual and serious viewer alike. By the time the 2021 women’s Olympic marathon rolled around, I was the one texting my friends about whether they’d seen Molly Seidel’s groundbreaking bronze medal performance.

Running asks very little of a viewer, but feels communal, and cathartic, and inspiring—feelings that are increasingly hard to come by in these particularly bleak and fractured times. It’s also just a joy to witness; and as I’ve become a more dedicated fan, I’ve come to appreciate its particular drama and intrigue. Watching as a mass of competitors thins out into a small pack of frontrunners; seeing the determination in runners’ faces as they decide when to make a break for the lead, only to sometimes get subsumed by the pack again; witnessing the absolute bliss of a first-time winner breaking the tape—all of it is, genuinely, thrilling.

I mostly follow the women’s division, in part because we’re living through an incredible moment for American women’s distance running. For decades, the sport was deemed unsafe for our supposedly fragile physiology, and women were barred from participating. The Boston Marathon has been run annually since 1897; women, though, weren’t officially allowed to compete until 1972. (This year, more than 12,000 of the approximately 30,000 runners were women.) Women’s participation in marathon running has increased steadily since the ’70s, but as the New York Times has reported, there’s been “a sea change in women’s running” in the last decade. Simply put: Way more women are running way faster than ever. Consider the U.S. Olympic Trials, which are open to any American woman who can complete a marathon within its wildly fast cut-off time (right now, that’s just under two and a half hours). In 2016, fewer than 200 women met that qualifying mark, as the Times reported; just four years later, that number jumped to over 500. (Meanwhile, the number of qualifying men during that time increased by fewer than 50.) There has never been a time where there’s more enthusiasm, community, or resources for women who want to push themselves to be the best runners they can be—and watching that magic take place at the highest levels of the sport has successfully turned me into a lifelong fan.

Unfortunately, like all sports, it isn’t without its less uplifting aspects. The ever-higher ceiling for women runners has also attracted backlash from anti-trans campaigners, who have fought to keep trans women out of professional running, casting doubt on the biology of women they deem “too masculine” and making it near-impossible for non-binary runners to compete on their own terms. So much of what inspires me about watching women’s running—and being a runner myself—is about pushing past the assumed limits of our genders and our bodies, which makes the bigotry inherent in marginalizing trans runners feel, to me, particularly painful and incongruous. When I look to runners like Nikki Hiltz—a nonbinary middle-distance runner who represented the United States at the Olympics—and the scores of queer run clubs popping up all over the country: That’s where I, as a fan, see the true future of the sport.

Running is an individual activity, but watching (and, of course, participating in) a marathon feels like a community endeavor. Each fall, when the New York City Marathon takes over the streets of the city where I now live, I watch as the roads fill up with people across a wide range of ages, races, sizes, and abilities—all united by their participation in attempting a time-honored and miraculous feat. The sidewalks, meanwhile, are populated with ardent fans, casual viewers, young kids being hoisted on their parents’ shoulders, well-behaved dogs providing moral support; homemade signs that range from tried-and-true to weirdly topical; strangers offering racers water or Gatorade or high-fives—together, watching the sheer speed of the pros as they zoom past, making it all look elegant and easy. Even people who don’t care about running, or would never engage in the sport on their own time, quietly admit that it’s the best day of the year—and who am I to disagree? Just don’t come complaining to me when you suddenly find yourself glued to a stream of a race in a far-off city, crying over a total stranger as she crosses the finish line.

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June 23, 2025September 12, 2025

Watching People Run Makes Me Feel Alive

by Marissa Lorusso

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