Seeds of Change

Seeds of Change: Women Cultivating Food Sovereignty in Hawai'i and Aotearoa explores how alternative food networks (AFNs) create spaces for women to engage in dialogue and resistance through storytelling. These narratives, rooted in lived experience, offer critical insight for shaping more just food policies and practices. Focusing on the contexts of Hawai'i and Aotearoa New Zealand, the book examines how efforts to decolonize agriculture and food systems challenge industrialized agro-food models and foster meaningful participation by women in Indigenous and marginalized communities-groups often at the forefront of climate crises and ecological stewardship in island ecosystems.

Drawing on interviews with Kanaka Maoli, Māori, and other women from diverse backgrounds, the book foregrounds Indigenous ecological values, in which knowledge and being are deeply interconnected. Centering storytelling as both method and praxis, Seeds of Change considers how these values inform women's leadership in AFNs and explores their potential to inspire new models of agricultural community. Ultimately, the book offers insights and best practices relevant not only to island ecosystems but also to global movements for food sovereignty and environmental justice.

Monique Mironesco is a professor of political science at the University of Hawaiʻi-West Oʻahu, where she has taught since 2004. Her research focuses on the intersections of gender and alternative food systems, civic engagement, environmental awareness, and feminist political ecology. She is the co-editor, with Kathy Ferguson, of Gender and Globalization in Asia and the Pacific (University of Hawai'i Press, 2008).