My current book project, First Food Justice: (Re)Constructing Expert Authority 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 Mothers' Milk Bank Northeast, 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 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 the role of expertise in activism around a range of issues 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. I also have a co-authored piece related to this work under review at the Journal on Human Lactation. Data for this project is qualitative and include interviews, primary-source analysis, and observation.
In my previous project, I examined the comparative politics of local food with a focus on Detroit and Cleveland, USA. Data for this project include over 75 in-depth interviews, over 48 hours of observation, and hundreds of primary source documents. 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. I also published findings from this study in the popular national magazine Urban Farm. Additionally, I co-authored a case study on urban agriculture in Detroit with the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) for their What Makes Urban Food Policy Happen? series.
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 include over 75 in-depth interviews, over 48 hours of observation, and hundreds of primary source documents. 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. I also published findings from this study in the popular national magazine Urban Farm. Additionally, I co-authored a case study on urban agriculture in Detroit with the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) for their What Makes Urban Food Policy Happen? series.
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.
