Pronouns: they/them

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 in Sociology. 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 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; identity surveys with each interviewee; critical discourse analysis of organizational artifacts; critical visual examination of agricultural educational spaces; and reflexive ethnographic practices. My inquiry is guided by the epistemological and methodological principles of activist scholarship in higher education. My dissertation includes the following substudies:

• Agricultural Settler Conquest 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-industrial-educational 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. I use the framework of settler colonialism and the co-constitutive logics of white supremacy, racial capitalism, and cisheteropatriarchy to articulate the ontological and epistemological contours of the First Morrill Act both as land policy and as educational policy, with particular attention to agricultural education. I then turn to how the founding of UC Berkeley in 1868 is entwined with the genocide of Native Californians and the state’s distinctive development as an agrarian racial capitalist society from the start of the U.S. occupation. 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 agrarian racial capitalism and white supremacy are visible in UC Berkeley’s research and education spaces. In an article in Whiteness and Education, 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 of 1862 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.

• 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. As university actors worked to make sense of a call for change, this study provides empirical evidence of how social “shock events” can provide some openings for anti-racist actors to perform strategic action to mobilize organizational shifts at the same time that the racialized and other inequality-making features of organizations mediate the foreclosure of on-the-ground cultural and practical changes in higher education institutions. 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 have a book chapter under review in which we engage in critical reflection on the project as an effort toward lasting organizational change.

• “Feeling of Community”: Relational and Affective Pedagogy for Anti-Racist Organizational Change: This study examines an educational and professional development intervention within CNR’s largest department, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management (ESPM). During the national racial justice protests of 2020, five ESPM doctoral students, 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 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 researchers take the course together, and the teaching team consisted of doctoral students. ESPM 290 was offered again in 2021. This study investigates the meanings that participants made about anti-racism and what the course has done for organizational change. It draws on interviews and identity surveys with 32 participants and teaching team members of the 2020 and 2021 courses, course syllabi, and reflexive ethnography through my experience as a member of the teaching team and course advocate. I examine one of six overarching themes from the study, which I call a “feeling of community,” as an undertheorized relational and affective aspect of organizational change work and anti-racist meaning-making. This study contributes to the fields of organizational theory and anti-racist pedagogy by investigating the potential organizational change outcomes of innovative pedagogical and professional development interventions. Simultaneously, the full teaching team for the 2020 and 2021 courses co-authored an article in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences that outlines our theory of change and pedagogical approach, and offers reflections on successes and challenges.