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Visiting Scholar
Institute for Advanced Study
University of Minnesota

Current research

Whiteness, anti-racism and alternative food practice

This study, begun in 2003 and aided by a grant from the National Science Foundation in 2004 (Project summary), sought to determine how US alternative food efforts produce race through the strategies, imaginaries and bodies that constitute these networks. I have published three papers based on this research: 'Whiteness, space and alternative food practice' (Geoforum), 'Anti-racist practice in the work of community food organizations' (Antipode) and 'The embodied politics of pain in US anti-racism' (ACME). Pdfs of these papers are under Publications.

Race, food and public space: an ethnography of the Minneapolis Farmers' Market

Building on the previous study, this work situates farmers' markets in the context of a burgeoning interest in local food and the promotion of farmers' markets as vehicles for food change. Through markets, alternative food organizations seek to support local farmers, regional economies, sustainable farming and better access to vegetables.

As with the earlier study, I am again focusing on race on the understanding that there is a racial dimension to farming and marketing. This ethnography is interested in food practices that are also racial practices operating at the scale of engagements among vendors or with customers, the methods of growing particular foods and ways of marketing.

Two publications from this research are available. One, titled Local Food and Diversity in Public Space: A Study of the Perceptions and Practices of Minneapolis Farmers’ Market Customers published in the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs' journal, The Reporter, outlines some conclusions from a CURA funded survey of customers at the Minneapolis Farmers' Market. The other, 'Thinking race through corporeal feminist theory: divisions and intimacies at the Minneapolis Farmers' Market' was published in Social and Cultural Geography. Pdfs are available under Publications.

Food Justice

I am doing these research projects because they are compelling on an intellectual and ethical level. As a consequence, not only do I work on them to contribute to scholarship and teaching, but I also try to contribute to collective action that promotes more socially and environmentally just ways of eating, growing, distributing and procuring food. I am involved in the Minneapolis Farmers' Market Advisory Committee (contact David at Midtown FM for more info) and participated in meetings for the Home Grown Minneapolis Initiative. I am also a member of the Minnesota Food and Justice Alliance, a collection of organizations and individuals seeking to promote racial justice in the food system. Finally, I am a member of the UMN Agri-Food Reading Group, a group open to any interested in reading and discussing scholarship on food and farming.

Click here to go to a page devoted to websites and publications on the subject of racial justice and the local food movement. It is a work in progress.

Doctoral and MA research

My doctoral research (Geography, Clark University) considered the translation of global climate change into a local issue in cities across the United States.  The research explored municipal commitments to greenhouse gas emissions reduction as part of the Cities for Climate Protection campaign. The findings were based on 135 interviews I conducted in Minneapolis, Tucson and Seattle as well as phone interviews with campaign contacts in 12 other cities.  This climate politics, an effort to abate greenhouse gas emissions at the municipal level, recast the city scale as the site of capacity and responsibility in the face of national inaction on global warming.  I argued that the campaign drew on a neoliberal understanding of the urban citizen as consumer instead of cultivating the 'counterpublics' required to provoke greater accountability for our emissions (pdf of EPA paper).  I also wrote about strategies of the Cities for Climate Protection campaign and Greenpeace Canada that were deployed to make climate change locally relevant.  Within this North American climate politics were people seeking to ‘protect the climate’ on behalf of polar bears, Saguaro cactus and future generations.  I argued that a sound climate strategy would ask constituents to see relational connections among scaled processes and across the spectrum of life (pdf of EPD paper). 

My MA degree (International Development Program, Clark University) explored gender relations, land tenure and development ideologies in a rice project called the Office du Niger in Ségou, Mali.  I was interested in how women transgressed, re-articulated and evaded gendered development policy as well as how that policy stymied their need for land and time to grow rice, onions and chili.  I conducted interviews across the five zones of the Office and held focus groups where women recorded a message to the Agriculture Minister and international donors, namely the Dutch aid agency, concerning their desire to be allocated rice plots.  Later, the tapes were aired in a program on national radio in Bamako.  In addition, I plotted gendered daily work schedules  and mapped land tenure arrangements.  Women's customary use rights to land was a tenure pattern not observed in the Office.  Strong support for productivist development ideologies by both international donors and the state meant women-in-development advocacy centered on hulling machines, not land access.  Women secretly rented land nonetheless. Men's responsibilities to the household were also the subject of much discussion. Women claimed men no longer purchased household staples nor withheld enough rice from sale for yearly household consumption, resulting in a dearth during the lean months.