People

I am broadly interested in the processes through which Historically White Land-Grant Universities envision, design, and enact—and inhibit—institutional change to improve justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) outcomes in their agri-food systems education. My PhD advisor is Alastair Iles and I am a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Currently I am exploring the following threads in my doctoral work:

• Historically White Land-Grant Universities and Indigenous land dispossession: The Morrill Act of 1862, which created the U.S. land-grant university system, applied settler-colonial epistemology to powerfully intertwine the expansion of private property with public education by selling nearly 11 million acres of Indigenous land to establish state university endowments. I am examining how the founding of the University of California is intricately tied to the development of racialized agriculture and California’s unique history of dispossession and genocide of Native peoples, and how data on the land sales that funded UC’s endowment might serve efforts by Indigenous communities to rematriate land, obtain reparations from the State, and decolonize the University. In 2020 I co-organized a workshop on the University of California Land-Grab: A Legacy of Profit from Indigenous Land. Read a report on key learnings and recommendations from the conference here.

* ESPM 290: Critical Engagements in Anti-Racist Environmental Scholarship: In 2020, five graduate students (including me) developed and co-taught a course on anti-racist praxis within environmental sciences aimed at changing our department culture through collective learning and concrete interventions. The course was held again in 2021. ESPM 290 is unique in that it is a semester-long, concentrated effort in a learning environment where traditional academic hierarchies are flattened: graduate students, faculty, cooperative extension specialists, staff, and postdocs all are learning together, and the teaching team consists of doctoral students. Thus, it has the potential to advance JEDI in ways that other shorter term and/or population-specific efforts might not. I am conducting interviews with participants in the 2020 and 2021 courses to understand what meanings they are making about anti-racism and how the course might support participants in working toward institutional change.

• UC Berkeley organizational change: In the context of the 2020 nationwide call for racial justice, I am conducting interviews and participant observation to learn how agri-food systems scholars in the UC Berkeley Rausser College of Natural Resources (Berkeley’s land-grant arm) approach JEDI issues in the college. This study is part of a larger project to understand land-grant organizational change in action.

• Race, Space, and Whiteness in UC Berkeley’s Agricultural Complex: I am writing about UC Berkeley’s Hilgard Hall as a text of whiteness to explore how an academic building dedicated to agricultural research and education renders racial power relations. An article entitled "‘To rescue for human society the native values of rural life’: Race, space, and whiteness in the University of California, Berkeley’s Agricultural Complex” is currently under review.

I began the PhD after a 20-year career in food movement nonprofit work and service to the University of California. I served as program manager at the Berkeley Food Institute from 2014–2o22, pursuing the first three years of doctoral work as a concurrent staff member. At BFI I played an integral role in the development of the Food Systems Minor and Graduate Certificate in Food Systems, and am lead researcher for the UC Berkeley Foodscape Mapping Project. In 2018 I cofounded the Staff Basic Needs Working Group, which provides food, housing, and economic resources for UC Berkeley employees. 

I also spend a lot of time thinking about visual culture and queer popular music. My first academic publication was on Bruce Springsteen’s queer musical aesthetic. For more on my visual art life, see my personal website.