Pronouns: they/them

Curriculum Vitae

I am a currently a postdoctoral scholar in the department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-director of the HBCU-Berkeley Environmental Scholars for Change Program. I co-founded the program in 2021 to facilitate multidirectional learning among Spelman College, Tuskegee University, and UC Berkeley students and faculty while fostering preparedness and belonging for HBCU students interested in graduate school at Berkeley.

My research program examines agri-food systems education and anti-racist and decolonial efforts toward higher education organizational change. I draw on critical and abolitionist university studies as an overarching framework, and also employ an interdisciplinary mix of critical theories that address racism and colonialism; organizational theories on inequality and change-making; and critical pedagogy of agri-food systems. I completed my doctorate in the division of Society and Environment in the department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley in May 2025. My dissertation research was supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship in Sociology, and I am honored to have gotten to work with a brilliant, interdisciplinary team of mentors spanning agri-food systems, education, and ethnic studies: Alastair Iles (dissertation chair), Kathryn De Master, Gina Garcia, Zeus Leonardo, and Victoria Robinson.

For my dissertation, Anti-Racist and Decolonial Organizational Change Work in Agricultural Higher Education, I conducted a mixed methods in-depth case study of the UC Berkeley College of Natural Resources (CNR) to investigate how one Historically White Land Grant University envisions and enacts—and inhibits—organizational change to advance anti-racism and decolonization in their agricultural education. My dissertation research design included: (a) 129 in-depth, semi-structured interviews; (b) interviewee identity surveys; (c) content analysis analysis of organizational artifacts; (d) critical visual examination of agricultural teaching and research spaces; and (e) critical reflexivity and critical autoethnographic practices. My dissertation consists of four substudies that each examine different levels and processes for envisioning, enacting, and contesting organizational change: 

• The First Morrill Act and Its Afterlife: Settler Conquest, White Supremacy, and the Founding of the University of California Agricultural Education, examines the development of agricultural settler conquest and white supremacy from the beginning of the U.S. occupation of California in 1846 through the first six decades of the UC College of Agriculture. Across two chapters I analyze archival texts, secondary sources, and physical spaces to uncover CNR’s historically-specific development and entrenchment of racist and settler colonial ideologies/institutions.

• The 2020 Racial Justice Movement and Organizational Change Possibilities in the College of Natural Resources provides an “ecosystem view” of ideas, discourse, and perceptions of change circulating in CNR in the 2020 context through semi-longitudinal interviews with agricultural scholars and administrators with different professional positions and personal identities. 

• The Campus Foodscape as Praxis: Participatory Mapping, Pedagogy, and Organizational Change, examines the six-year UC Berkeley Foodscape Mapping Project, which used the campus as a living laboratory for members to generate agri-food systems knowledge while developing programs, campaigns, and cartographic resources to advance equity. Across three chapters I analyze the ways in which a multi-year organizational change project that used pedagogical and research practices aimed at participatory, student-led learning experiences worked, and not, and what this reveals about change-making processes in CNR.

• The “Critical Engagements in Anti-Racist Environmental Scholarship” Course as a Site of Organizational Change investigates a course developed by doctoral students during the national racial justice protests of 2020 for members of CNR’s largest department 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 course was distinctive in that it was a learning environment that aimed to flatten traditional academic hierarchies: graduate students, faculty, staff, and postdoctoral scholars took the class together, and the teaching team consisted of doctoral students. I examine how the course cultivated an undertheorized relational and affective aspect of organizational change work which I call “feeling of community.”