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Food Law Series - webinar (May 6, 15.00-16.30 CET): Food deserts: the role of US policy in Spatialized Food (In)Justice
We are delighted to announce that Erica Zurawski will present her research during our next research seminar.
All the way down you can click on the link to join the Teams meeting
Abstract
Since its proliferation in the early 2000s, the concept of a food desert has captivated popular imaginaries in the United States, conjuring images of barren, desolate, and uninhabitable desert landscapes to metaphorize inequitable food landscapes. As this seminar discusses, this popular concept invokes colonial spatial imaginaries of places in need of improvement, which when enshrined in US policy, valorize and invite exclusionary and unjust capital development projects. In this sense, the food desert designation is more than a symptom or indicator of uneven development, but perhaps a component of the uneven (re)development of urban landscapes.
This seminar introduces Erica Zurawski’s dissertation research, first with a brief history of the food desert concept and then a discussion on United States policy’s role in prioritizing capital-driven development to the exclusion of more politically- and systems-oriented food justice projects. Through a legal-geographic analytic, this research documents the co-constitutive role of law, space, and food (in)justice through what Erica calls food desert improvement projects.
Bio
Erica Zurawski is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of California Santa Cruz. She also holds her Juris Doctor from the University of Wisconsin Law School where she specialized in International Environmental Law. Her dissertation engages critical food studies, critical human and legal geographies, and urban sociology to examine the role of the food desert concept in uneven development processes. Utilizing a comparative-historical methodological approach and legal-geographic analytic, Erica’s research seeks to articulate the mutual constitution