Pronouns: they/she

Curriculum Vitae

I am a doctoral candidate in the division of Society and Environment in the department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley. My PhD advisor is Alastair Iles and I am a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. I am broadly interested in the processes through which Historically White Land Grant Universities envision and enact—and inhibit—organizational change to improve anti-racist and decolonial outcomes in their agri-food systems education. I use an interdisciplinary lens of critical and abolitionist university studies; organizational sociology; critical theories of race, settler-colonialism, and whiteness; and critical pedagogy of agri-food systems. My dissertation, entitled “Anti-Racist and Decolonial Organizational Change Work in Agricultural Higher Education,” is a mixed methods case study of UC Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources (CNR, which is the University’s land-grant arm). It includes 130 in-depth interviews, content analysis of organizational artifacts, participant observation, and visual examination of physical spaces. My inquiry is guided by the epistemological and methodological principles of activist scholarship in higher education. Currently I am exploring the following threads in my doctoral work:

• Agricultural White Supremacy and the University of California: In this study I examine UC Berkeley’s founding as a land-grant university just two decades after the U.S. occupation of California. Following on scholars who similarly interrogate the land-grant university movement as the land-grab university movement (Lee & Ahtone, 2020), I analyze how the Morrill Act of 1862 instigated a Eurocentric agri-educational-industrial complex premised on negation of Native subjecthood and epistemologies of land use through the selling of nearly 11 million acres of Indigenous land to establish state university endowments. The founding of UC Berkeley in 1868 is entwined with the genocide of Native Californians and the state’s development of an agrarian capitalist economy. In 2020 I co-organized a forum, The University of California Land-Grab: A Legacy of Profit from Indigenous Land, and co-authored a follow up report on recommendations for actions the University can take to address its ongoing legacy of dispossession of Native Californians.

• Race, Space, and Whiteness in UC Berkeley’s Agricultural Complex: The material and ideological underpinnings of the Morrill Act’s agricultural white supremacy are visible in UC Berkeley’s research and education spaces. I perform a close reading of Hilgard Hall, built in 1917 as one of three buildings of the CNR Agricultural Complex and named after the College’s first dean, Eugene W. Hilgard, to explore how the afterlife of the Morrill Act and the violent settling of California spatially and physically render racial power relations into the present. I examine the anti-Black racial ideology of Hilgard Hall’s namesake, the building’s architecture features, and the carved epigraph, “To rescue for human society the native values of rural life.” This work speaks to the current debates on removing monuments and building names and how agricultural programs might approach addressing the ways white supremacy is literally constructed in(to) their teaching and research spaces. An article about this work is in the journal Whiteness & Education.

• The 2020 Racial Justice Movement and Organizational Change Possibilities in the College of Natural Resources: The 2020 police murders of George Floyd and many other Black Americans that resulted in a national racial justice movement potentially created an opening for shifts in dominant ideologies ruling higher education. This moment provided an opportunity to examine how university actors make sense of a call for change, and what organizational features and processes mediate both the enactment and foreclosure of on-the-ground cultural and practical changes in higher education institutions. In this study I investigate what CNR agri-food systems scholars and administrators think the College should do to address racism and other equity issues; their discourse; and how they evaluate this work based on their understandings of organizational change. I designed this study to learn the perspectives of a variety of actors who do not share identities, professional positions, values, and experiences. The study includes 44 agricultural faculty, graduate students, professional staff, and administrators across CNR’s teaching departments, research centers, and administrative, facilities, and student affairs units. To examine changes over time, I conducted two in-depth interviews with each participant two years apart, in 2020 and 2022.

• The Campus Foodscape as Praxis: Participatory Mapping, Pedagogy, and Organizational Change: This study investigates an intervention within CNR at the intersection of equity and agricultural education. The UC Berkeley Foodscape Mapping Project was a six-year activist research and pedagogical project I directed from 2015–2021 in my professional staff capacity at CNR’s Berkeley Food Institute. The project used the Berkeley campus as a living laboratory for students, staff, and faculty to generate agri-food systems knowledge while developing programs, campaigns, and cartographic resources to advance equity. This study examines the ways in which a multi-year organizational change project that used new pedagogical practices for participatory, student-led learning experiences worked (and not), and what this reveals about change-making processes. Alastair Iles and I have published articles about how to use participatory mapping to attempt transformation in the campus foodscape, and about how foodscape mapping can serve as a platform for expansive learning and justice-centered agri-food systems education. We are currently working on a third piece in which we engage in critical reflection on the project as an effort toward organizational change.

• ESPM 290 as a Site of Organizational Change and Anti-Racist Meaning Making: This study explores an anti-racist educational and professional development intervention within CNR’s largest department, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management (ESPM). In 2020, five doctoral students in the ESPM Graduate Diversity Council, including me, developed a 16-week course entitled “ESPM 290: Critical Engagements in Anti-Racist Environmental Scholarship” for members of the department to engage in collaborative learning to deepen our understanding of anti-racism in academia, and through concrete action projects, attempt to change departmental structures, strategy, and culture. The course is unique in that it is a learning environment where traditional academic hierarchies are flattened: graduate students, faculty, staff, and postdocs take the course together, and the teaching team consists of doctoral students. Thus, it has the potential to advance anti-racism in ways that population-specific efforts might not. I conducted in-depth interviews with participants and teaching team members of 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 organizational change. I also critically reflect on my own role as an original member of the course development and teaching team and advocate for its continuation. It offers insights into how academic departments can address structural racism through innovative pedagogical and professional development interventions.