My current book project, First Food Justice: (Re)Constructing Expertise in the Struggle for Infant Feeding Equity in America, is a wide-ranging, intersectional analysis of women claiming and (re)claiming agency over infant feeding in America. I explore several of the historic and ongoing injustices surrounding who feeds infants what foods, where, and when, and I analyze current efforts to address these problems in the US. Specifically, through case studies of the Human Milk Bank of New York, Black Breastfeeding Week, the Navajo Healthy Start Act, and La Leche League’s Nursing Beyond a Year Initiative, I illustrate how women develop and deploy new forms of expert authority to resist oppression in the first food system. This analysis disrupts common narratives of women, including black and indigenous women, as passive bystanders in the colonization of their communities and ill-equipped to steer the defining act of nourishing babies. Theoretically, it shifts the study of first foods and infant feeding from the domain of public health towards their role in upholding and undoing unjust systems. Moreover, in illuminating how expert knowledge is (re)made in struggles for first food justice, this research contributes to our understanding of multiple other contemporary efforts to achieve equity at the intersection of health, food, and the environment. In addition to my book manuscript, I discuss these issues in forthcoming articles in the journals Environmental Justice and Breastfeeding Medicine. Data for this project is qualitative and includes interviews, primary-source analysis, and observation. The Creating Connections Consortium funds this research.
In my previous project, I examined the comparative politics of local food with a focus on Detroit and Cleveland, USA. Data for this project includes over 75 in-depth interviews, over 48 hours of observation, and hundreds of primary source documents. I published findings from this study in the Erb Institute's White Paper Series and the popular national magazine Urban Farm. A scholarly manuscript from this project, "Localizing Detroit’s Food System: Boundary-Work and the Politics of Experiential Expertise ", is forthcoming in a special issue on justice and counter expertise with the journal Science as Culture. Additionally, I am working with the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) to co-author a case study on Detroit for their upcoming series on sustainable cities.
I have also completed qualitative research projects concerning the global and epistemic dimensions of intellectual property rights debates in food and agriculture (published in Mobilization: An International Journal, winner of the Society for the Study of Social Problems' Best Graduate Student Paper, and winner of the University of Michigan's Mark Chesler Research Award), disparities in environmental impact statement participation (published in the Michigan Journal of Sustainability), and the ethical treatment of human subjects of research (with Raymond De Vries, published in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics). Recently, I also completed a case study of a Vermont-based fish company as a means to unpack notions of "local" and "sustainable" (an article from this research is in under review in the journal Food and Food Ways).
Please contact me for full copies of my publications.
In my previous project, I examined the comparative politics of local food with a focus on Detroit and Cleveland, USA. Data for this project includes over 75 in-depth interviews, over 48 hours of observation, and hundreds of primary source documents. I published findings from this study in the Erb Institute's White Paper Series and the popular national magazine Urban Farm. A scholarly manuscript from this project, "Localizing Detroit’s Food System: Boundary-Work and the Politics of Experiential Expertise ", is forthcoming in a special issue on justice and counter expertise with the journal Science as Culture. Additionally, I am working with the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) to co-author a case study on Detroit for their upcoming series on sustainable cities.
I have also completed qualitative research projects concerning the global and epistemic dimensions of intellectual property rights debates in food and agriculture (published in Mobilization: An International Journal, winner of the Society for the Study of Social Problems' Best Graduate Student Paper, and winner of the University of Michigan's Mark Chesler Research Award), disparities in environmental impact statement participation (published in the Michigan Journal of Sustainability), and the ethical treatment of human subjects of research (with Raymond De Vries, published in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics). Recently, I also completed a case study of a Vermont-based fish company as a means to unpack notions of "local" and "sustainable" (an article from this research is in under review in the journal Food and Food Ways).
Please contact me for full copies of my publications.
