Research
Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both. ~C. Wright Mills
What distinguishes man/woman as human and differentiates us from all other living things is our ability to reflect upon our past and present experiences and to project visions and programs for human struggle to create a new future. ~James and Grace Lee Boggs
I am an Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Prison Agriculture Lab at Colorado State University. My research focuses on food and agriculture as sites of economic, political, and social struggle. My recent work studies food systems, food cultures, and social movements within contexts like prison, gentrification, and racial capitalism. Underlying these interests is an ongoing engagement with how activists and scholars articulate and practice autonomy and freedom and what this means for building broad based social movements.
My focus on food is a lens to address a range of sociological questions around social change, political economy, urbanization, social hierarchies, human/nature relations, punishment, and power.
I am the author of Food Justice Now!: Deepening the Roots of Social Struggle (2018, University of Minnesota Press). I co-edited alongside Alison Alkon and Yuki Kato A Recipe for Gentrification: Food, Power, and Resistance in the City (2020, New York University Press, Edited Volume Honorable Mention-Association for the Study of Food and Society). I also co-edited a special double issue alongside Ashanté Reese in Food and Foodways called Food and Carcerality: From Confinement to Abolition.
