This workshop will feature two scholars Dr. Jessica Barnes from the University of South Carolina and Dr. Megan Carney from the University of Arizona, in conversation on their research at the intersections of critical food security, migration/refugee studies, and precarity. The workshop will explore how marginalized groups experience food insecurity and how it manifests across borders by engaging comparatively across the regions of the Americas and the Middle East. Both scholars will bring first person stories from their ethnographic research illustrating how hunger and the procurement and preparation of food intersects with gender, class and migrant status. The first person stories will draw from Dr. Barnes’s ethnographic research into how plant breeding, wheat farming, grain storage, and bread baking intersect with working class Egyptians’ consumption of subsidized bread, and Dr. Carney’s participatory film and storytelling lab that explores themes of hunger, displacement, and social solidarity with migrant youth from the Southwestern US. The discussion will explore complex and sometimes contested concepts that may feature in current events discussions in the classroom like: ‘food security,’ staple foods, refugees and migration, border regimes, gender, social class, poverty, xenophobia, national security, racialization, sanctuary cities, etc.
Secondary/High School |World/International | Critical Food Studies
Covetto
Dr. Jessica Barnes is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and School of Earth, Ocean, and Environment at the University of South Carolina. Dr. Barnes’ research examines the everyday practices of resource use and differential experiences of environmental change. She studies how societies interact with their environments and the political dynamics, social relations, materials, and technologies that both shape and are shaped by these interactions.
Her most recent book, Staple Security: Brand and Wheat in Egypt (2022, Duke University Press) examines the role these staples play in Egyptian daily life and the sense of existential threat tied to the possibility of bread not being available or tasting inadequate. Linking global flows of grain and national bread subsidy program with everyday household practices, Barnes theorizes the nexus between food and security, drawing attention to staples and the lengths people go to secure them.
Dr. Barnes is currently developing a new project on air pollution in London, which examines how air pollution is woven into the fabric of daily lives in racialized and class-inflected ways. Based in a diverse, low-income London neighborhood with high levels of air pollution, the project explores how people move through, walk alongside, and live close to the traffic that is the main source of emissions, breathing air that carries unseen dangers. Focusing on three scaled domains of the home, street, and city, the project looks at the nexus of people, air, and pollutants and the systemic inequalities that influence how these things come together. Dr. Barnes received her PhD in sustainable development from Columbia University.
Dr. Megan Carney is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Regional Food Studies at the University of Arizona. Her primary research and teaching interests include critical migration and diaspora studies, critical food studies, health equity and social inequality, the food-climate-migration nexus, the politics of care and social solidarity, and feminist methodology and pedagogy.
She is the author of two critically-acclaimed books, The Unending Hunger: Tracing Women and Food Insecurity Across Borders (2015, University of California Press) examines how constraints on eating and feeding translate to uneven distribution of life chances across borders, how neoliberal economic policies render hunger and displacement, and how the framework of “food security” dominates national policy in the United States. Her second book Island of Hope: Migration and Solidarity in the Mediterranean (2021, University of California Press), is an ethnography of the politics of economic austerity and migrant reception in Southern Europe, specifically Sicily, and the emergent forms of “solidarity work” being performed on the frontlines of migrant receiving communities. She continues to work with grassroots migrant solidarity initiatives, including a participatory film and storytelling lab for migrant youth.
Presently, she is engaged in ongoing, collaborative research with several community organizations in Tucson focused on racial justice and health equity. She is also the co-founder and co-director of “The Future of Food and Social Justice: A Youth Storytelling Project,” which provides internships and diverse opportunities for mentorship, storytelling, and community engagement. Dr. Carney received her PhD and MA in Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Barbara and her BA in Anthropology and Italian from UCLA.
