Research Program

I employ diverse critical social theories, organizational theory, and qualitative methods to advance understandings in three main areas: 1) The possibilities of liberatory agri-food systems and environmental sciences pedagogy; 2) Institutional legacies and policies that shaped the conditions of possibility for U.S. agricultural higher education; and 3) The strategies and challenges of those working to create change to organizational culture, policies, and practices.  

For my dissertation, I conducted a mixed methods in-depth case study of the UC Berkeley College of Natural Resources to investigate how varied actors at one Historically White Land Grant University envision and enact—and inhibit—organizational change to advance anti-racism and decolonization in the college’s agricultural work.

My research and programmatic work has been supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship in Sociology, UC-HBCU Initiative, Maxwell-Hanrahan Foundation, and numerous grants and fellowships at UC Berkeley, including from the Office of Graduate Diversity; Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management; Center for Race and Gender; Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues Research; American Cultures Center; and Othering and Belonging Institute, among others. 

Current projects

1) The possibilities of liberatory agri-food systems and environmental sciences pedagogy  

The Campus Foodscape as Praxis: Participatory Mapping, Pedagogy, and Organizational Change: This project contributes to the growing field of critical pedagogy of agri-food systems by examining the six-year UC Berkeley Foodscape Mapping Project, which used the university campus as a living laboratory for members to generate agri-food systems knowledge while developing programs, campaigns, and cartographic resources to advance equity. In articles in Case Studies in the Environment and Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, co-author Alastair Iles and I analyze the project’s student-driven, collaborative pedagogical philosophy and creative mobilization of organizational structures to support students in undergoing expansive learning through their everyday experiences of engaging with their physical and socio-cultural environment. In a chapter in Hungry for Change: How Postsecondary Campuses Are Transforming Food Systems, we bring organizational theory into constructive tension with critical pedagogy to assess why and how experiential agri-food systems education might, and might not, simultaneously advance organizational change in campus foodscapes.

Environmental Pedagogy for Anti-Racist Organizational Change: This study investigates an anti-racist pedagogical effort in the Department of Environmental Science, and Management at UC Berkeley that challenged participants to engage in collaborative learning to deepen understandings of anti-racism in academia, and through action projects, attempt to change departmental structures and culture. The 16-week “Critical Engagements in Anti-Racist Scholarship” course was a distinctive learning environment aimed at flattening academic hierarchies: graduate students, faculty, staff, and postdoctoral scholars took the course together, and the teaching team consisted of doctoral students. In an article in Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, my fellow instructors and I provide an overview of our pedagogical approach and highlight key elements of the course’s success: 1) Centering Black voices and experiences; 2) Flattening academic hierarchies; 3) Fostering a community of learners; and 4) Developing action-oriented mindsets to sustain long-term anti-racist praxis. 

In an article currently under review, I draw on 32 participant interviews to examine how the course created the conditions for new relational and affective experiences, which I call “feeling of community.” I contend that developing “feeling of community” is an effective strategy toward anti-racist organizational change work in higher education. This study offers empirical insights into how university departments can address structural racism through non-hierarchical, mixed-positional pedagogical and professional development interventions.

2) Institutional legacies and policies that shaped the conditions of possibility for U.S. agricultural higher education

Land Grant/Land Grab University Historiography: This project interrogates the role of the First Morrill Act of 1862 in the development and entrenchment of agrarian racial-settler capitalism in the United States. As the inaugural comprehensive federal higher education policy, the First Morrill Act served national interests by redistributing dispossessed Indigenous lands to build a system of so-called “Land Grant Universities” aimed at institutionalizing white, settler colonial agricultural knowledge production. Through analysis of archival texts, secondary sources, and physical campus spaces, I reveal the workings of the First Morrill Act as both land policy and education policy, with particular focus on the development of the University of California College of Agriculture (now the UC Berkeley College of Natural Resources) in the first decades after the U.S. occupation of California. This project contributes to both agrarian and higher education studies by demonstrating how agrarian racial-settler capitalist logics shaped the conditions of possibility for U.S. agricultural teaching, research, and public outreach. I have two articles in development on this topic, one co-authored with Aaron Alvarado. 

Race, Space, and Whiteness in Agricultural Teaching Spaces: In an article in Whiteness and Education, I perform a close reading of UC Berkeley’s Hilgard Hall, constructed for the College of Agriculture in 1917, to examine how the afterlife of the First Morrill Act and the violent settling of California spatially render racial power relations into the present. I offer a possible anti-racist and decolonial vision for Hilgard Hall through renovation and occupation. This article speaks to debates on removing campus 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.

3) The strategies and challenges of those working to create change to organizational culture, policies, and practices.  

The 2020 Racial Justice Movement and Organizational Change Im/Possibilities: The upswell in the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of the hypervisibility of anti-Black violence in 2020 rippled through higher education. In order to understand the effects of this so-called “Racial Reckoning” on agri-food systems education specifically, I conducted semi-longitudinal interviews with 45 UC Berkeley College of Natural Resources scholars and administrators with diverse professional positions and personal identities first in 2020, and then again in 2022. I focus on three subthemes: 1) The scope of the imagined realms of possibility for racially just agricultural higher education; 2) The dynamics between the discourse and actions of “newly aware” organizational power holders and their challengers; and 3) Actors’ perceptions of the change-making process, including what amount of—and what kinds of—shifts “feel like change.” This project provides nuanced analysis of how actors across different positions can make (or stifle) slow, effective organizational culture changes inside higher education. It also traces how this change-making process navigates the ongoing backlash against efforts in the U.S. to make universities (and other organizations) more equitable and anti-racist.

Peer-Reviewed Publications

Fanshel, R. Z., & Iles, A. (2026). Campus foodscape mapping as justice-oriented organizational change. In M. Classens, N. Spiegelaar, & M. Lawler (Eds.), Hungry for change: How postsecondary campuses are transforming food systems. University of Toronto Press.

[Co-first author] Mgbara, W., Fanshel, R. Z., Esquivel, K., Shannon, N., Parker-Shames, P., Elias, D. O., Washington, L., & Guzman, A. (2024). Cultivating anti-racism in the classroom and beyond through collaborative learning in the environmental sciences. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, 15(1), 199–216. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-024-00995-1

Fanshel, R. Z. (2023). “To rescue for human society the native values of rural life”: Race, space, and whiteness in the University of California, Berkeley’s agricultural complex. Whiteness and Education, 9(2), 177–198. https://doi.org/10.1080/23793406.2023.2213234

Fanshel, R. Z., & Iles, A. (2022). Mapping inequity: The campus foodscape as pedagogy and practice. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 6. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2022.759076

Fanshel, R. Z., & Iles, A. (2020). Transforming the campus foodscape through participatory mapping. Case Studies in the Environment, 4.https://doi.org/10.1525/cse.2020.1120325. Download the PDF here.

Fanshel, R. Z. (2013). Beyond blood brothers: Queer Bruce Springsteen. Popular Music, 32(3), 359–383. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143013000275

Other Publications

Blonder, B., Bowles, T., De Master, K., Fanshel, R. Z., Girotto, M., Kahn, A., Keenan, T., Mascarenhas, M., Mgbara, W., Pickett, S., Potts, M., & Rodriguez, M. (2022). Advancing inclusion and anti-racism in the college classroom: A rubric and resource guide for instructors. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5874656

[Lead author] Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues & Native American Student Development. (2021). The University of California land grab: A legacy of profit from Indigenous land—A report of key learnings and recommendations. University of California, Berkeley. https://uclandgrab.berkeley.edu/

Fanshel, R. Z. (2021). The Morrill Act as racial contract: Settler colonialism and U.S. higher education. Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1cc0c4tw#author

Fanshel, R. Z. (2021). The land in land-grant: Unearthing Indigenous dispossession in the founding of the University of California. Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7kx7k25f#author

Fanshel, R. Z., Iles, A., & Prier, M. (2018). Building equitable and inclusive food systems at UC Berkeley: Foodscape Mapping Project report. Berkeley Food Institute. https://food.berkeley.edu/report/building-equitable-and-inclusive-food-systems-at-uc-berkeley/