Wednesday, November 20, 2024
4:00 - 5:30pm (ET)
The Screening Room, CFA & via Zoom
Free and open to the public.

School food programs are about more than just feeding kids. They are a form of community care and a policy tool for advancing education, health, justice, food sovereignty, and sustainability. Transforming School Food Politics around the World illustrates how everyday people from a diverse range of global contexts have successfully challenged and changed programs that fall short of these ideals. Editors Jennifer Gaddis and Sarah A. Robert highlight the importance of global and local struggles to argue that the transformative potential of school food hinges on valuing the gendered labor that goes into caring for, feeding, and educating children.

Through accessible and inspiring essays, Transforming School Food Politics around the World shows politics in action. Chapter contributors include youths, mothers, teachers, farmers, school nutrition workers, academics, lobbyists, policymakers, state employees, nonprofit staff, and social movement activists. Drawing from historical and contemporary research, personal experiences, and collaborations with community partners, they provide readers with innovative strategies that can be used in their own efforts to change school food policy and systems. Ultimately, this volume sets the stage to reimagine school food as part of the infrastructure of daily life, arguing that it can and should be at the vanguard of building a new economy rooted in care for people and the environment.

Dr. Jennifer Gaddis is an associate professor of Civil Society and Community Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools(University of California Press, 2019), which won book awards from the National Women’s Studies Association and the International Association of Culinary Professionals. She is the co-editor with Sarah A. Robert of Transforming School Food Politics Around the World. Dr. Gaddis’ scholarship on the intersection of care and school food has been published in multiple journals including Feminist Economics, Agriculture and Human Values, and Radical Teacher. Gaddis is an advisory board member of the National Farm to School Network and has written op-eds on school food politics for popular media outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, The Guardian, and Teen Vogue. She and her students regularly partner with school districts, labor unions, and social movement organizations on community-based research and advocacy projects related to food justice in K-12 schools.

Dr. Sarah A. Robert is an associate professor at the University at Buffalo (SUNY) and an interdisciplinary expert in global education policies, global gender policies, and school food politics. Of particular interest in her ethnographic studies is how policy and politics shape and are shaped by the intersectional qualities of gender and other context specific dynamics. Dr. Robert is the author of the award-winning books Neoliberal Education Reform: Gendered Notions in Global and Local Contexts (Routledge, 2017) and School Food Politics (P. Lang, 2011). She is a trained Latin Americanist, who has pivoted to global comparative research, as demonstrated by her recent co-edited volume with Jennifer E. Gaddis, Transforming School Food Politics Around the World (MIT Press, 2024). Additional edited special issues for global audiences include Intersectionality and education work during COVID‐19 transitions (Gender, Work, and Organizations, 2023) and Neoliberalism, Gender, and Education Reform (Gender & Education, 2016; Routledge, 2018). She also has written extensively for transdisciplinary academic and popular audiences in multiple languages. Currently, she leads a multinational research team comparing government and teacher responses to COVID-19 in Argentina, Chile, the UK, and the USA.

Presented in partnership with:

Friday, October 18, 2024
4:00 - 5:30pm (ET)
Fitz Books & Waffles
Free and open to the public.

In Spiritualism's Place, four friends and scholars who produce the acclaimed Dig: A History Podcast, share their curiosity and enthusiasm for uncovering stories from the past as they explore the history of Lily Dale. Located in western New York State, the world's largest center for Spiritualism was founded in 1879. Lily Dale has been a home for Spiritualists attempting to make contact with the dead, as well as a gathering place for reformers, a refuge for seekers looking for alternatives to established paths of knowledge, and a target for skeptics.

This intimate history of Lily Dale reveals the role that this fascinating place has played within the history of Spiritualism, as well as within the development of the women's suffrage and temperance movements, and the world of New Age religion. As an intentional community devoted to Spiritualist beliefs and practices, Lily Dale brings together multiple strands in the social and religious history of New York and the United States over the past 150 years: feminism, social reform, utopianism, new religious movements, and cultural appropriation.

Averill Earls is an Assistant Professor of History at St. Olaf College, and the executive producer of Dig: A History podcast. She is a co-author of Spiritualism's Place: Reformers, Seekers, and Seances in Lily Dale. Her solo-authored book, Love in the Lav: A Social Biography of Same-Sex Desire in Ireland, 1922-1972, tells a history of same-sex desiring Irish men, the teen boys they loved, and the Gardaí who policed them, and is expected in 2025 from Temple University Press. 

Elizabeth Garner Masarik is an Assistant Professor of History at SUNY Brockport. Her book, The Sentimental State: How Women-Led Reform Built the American Welfare State focuses on women’s reform movements in the Gilded Age/Progressive Era. She is the author of “Por la Raza, Para la Raza: Jovita Idar and Progressive-era Mexicana Maternalism in the Texas-Mexican Border,” published in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly. The article won the A. Elizabeth Taylor Article Prize from the Southern Association of Women Historians. Elizabeth is the inaugural SUNY Dr. Virginia Radley Fellowship for women’s history.

Sarah Handley-Cousins is an Assistant Teaching Professor in History at the University at Buffalo. She is the author of Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North, and is currently at work on several projects on disability, gender, and medicine. 

Marissa C. Rhodes is an Assistant Professor of History at Saint Leo University near Tampa, FL. She is the former Managing Director of the Journal of the Plague Year: An Archive of COVID-19 at Arizona State University. She is currently working on a book project called Tender Trades: Wet Nursing and the Politics of Inequity in the Anglo-Atlantic, 1750-1815. 

This event is being co-sponsored by the UB Department of History. 

Teaching Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University at Buffalo

with commentary from Professor Dr. Anika König, Freie Universität Berlin, Institut für Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie

Friday, March 15, 2024
12:00 - 1:30pm (EST)
via Zoom
Free and open to the public.

Children are Everywhere engages with how demographic anxieties and reproductive regimes emerge as forms of social inclusion and exclusion in a low fertility Western European context. This book explores everyday experiences of parenting and childlessness of ‘ethnic’ Germans in Berlin, who came of age around the fall of the Berlin Wall, and brings them into conversation with theories on parenting, waithood, non-biological intimacies, and masculinities. This is the first ethnographic work by a South Asian author on demographic anxieties and reproduction in Germany and reverses the anthropological gaze to study Europe as the ‘Other.’

Meghana Joshi has an M.A. and M.Phil. in Social Work with a specialization in Child Welfare and Reproductive Health from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, India. Subsequently, she has worked on issues of childlessness, stigma, and medical treatment in urban slums in Mumbai, and on maternal and community health in the rural Himalayas. She finished her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in 2017. After a brief stint at Central Washington University, she has been employed as Teaching Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department at UB since 2018. Her book on gendered reproduction, fertility anxieties, intensive parenting, and childlessness is based on research in Berlin, Germany. She teaches on Medical Anthropology, Culture and Reproduction, Men and Masculinities, and Ethnographic Research. Her newly developing research interests include anthropology of loneliness and emergent forms of care.

Anika König is visiting professor at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin. Her work focuses on reproduction, especially transnational surrogacy, genetic testing, kinship, care, and gender. She has also worked extensively on violence, the senses and the body. Her recent work investigates the effects of major crises like the Covid pandemic or the war in Ukraine on the global fertility industry, and the gender health gap in Germany with a particular focus on endometriosis. Her work has appeared, among others, in Medical Anthropology, Biosocieties, New Genetics and Society, and Social Anthropology.

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