I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University, and I am a faculty affiliate of the ASU Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems.
My work intersects critical agrarian studies, political ecology, and anthropology, and I build interdisciplinary collaborations to find creative approaches to entrenched food system problems in the United States. Beyond food systems, my research and teaching interests include alternative economies, human-environment relations, policy and political economy, and qualitative methods.
My work intersects critical agrarian studies, political ecology, and anthropology, and I build interdisciplinary collaborations to find creative approaches to entrenched food system problems in the United States. Beyond food systems, my research and teaching interests include alternative economies, human-environment relations, policy and political economy, and qualitative methods.
I believe that longitudinal, connected research cultivates unique insights into how food systems function and change. I have been researching and working in U.S. agriculture since 2008. After graduating from Grinnell College in Iowa, I worked on multiple farms in eastern Iowa and at the University of Northern Iowa to facilitate partnerships between local food producers and institutional buyers. I also spent several months conducting on-farm research in New Zealand in 2011-12.
After receiving my PhD in Anthropology from Emory University in 2019, I served as the President's Postdoctoral Scholar in the School of Environment and Natural Resources at The Ohio State University. As a member of the Center for Community and Working Landscapes, I helped launch and analyze the inaugural Ohio Farm Poll and collaborated with the National Farm Medicine Center on research about the role of childcare on farms. From 2021-2022, I brought an anthropological perspective to the FACES Lab in the Emory Department of Environmental Sciences and led qualitative research on trajectories of agricultural diversification in rural North Carolina.
After receiving my PhD in Anthropology from Emory University in 2019, I served as the President's Postdoctoral Scholar in the School of Environment and Natural Resources at The Ohio State University. As a member of the Center for Community and Working Landscapes, I helped launch and analyze the inaugural Ohio Farm Poll and collaborated with the National Farm Medicine Center on research about the role of childcare on farms. From 2021-2022, I brought an anthropological perspective to the FACES Lab in the Emory Department of Environmental Sciences and led qualitative research on trajectories of agricultural diversification in rural North Carolina.
