Genealogies of the Food Desert Metaphor
Genealogies of the Food Desert: Towards a Grounded Politics of Metaphor draws on qualitative fieldwork conducted in Glasgow and London to construct the first historical account of the food desert metaphor and its transformation into a materially consequential policy object. In excavating the many genealogies of the metaphor, my work offers an empirical account of how metaphors can be made into socio-technical objects, how they articulate to and materialize within diverse politics as they travel, and how they reflect and inherit specific worldviews, values, and histories as they become consequential.
This work has been supported by the NSF Law and Science Dissertation Grant, the American Association of Geographers Food and Agriculture Specialty Group, the UC Global Food Initiative, the Association for the Study of Food and Society, and the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition’s Thomas Marchione Food-as-a-Human-Right Student Award. Many peer-reviewed publications have emerged from this research and demonstrate the interdisciplinary applicability of my work. My work appears in Environmental Humanities, Human Geography, and The International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food.
Visions of Regenerative Agriculture
In 2024, I joined Susanne Freidberg’s lab at Dartmouth College as a Postdoctoral Fellow to join the lab’s collaborative research on visions of regenerative agriculture in the United States. Through ongoing affiliation with the lab, I continue to examine the idea that regenerative agriculture produces more nutrient dense food through fieldwork and in-depth interviews with movement leaders, corporate brands, venture capitalists, farmers, nutritionists, and soil scientists. This research aims to understand how various actors promote and debate the nutrient density imaginary, and how they leverage it as a mechanism for broader food systems change and climate change mitigation.
The project is funded by the National Science Foundation’s Science and Technology Studies Program.
Erica Zurawski 