Nutrire CoLab

Check out our new podcast (w/ 20 co-hosts!) that explores eating, feeding, caring, and healing from a critical medical & feminist anthropological lens!

S1 E1 - Introducing Nutrire CoLab!

This episode features @hannagarth interviewed by @anthro919 about her book Food in Cuba, volume Black Food Matters with @AMReese07 and new projects on the horizon.

S1 E2 - Natali Valdez interviews Hanna Garth

In this bonus episode, we feature a recent talk by Dr. Pascale Joassart-Marcelli in which she discusses her new book "The $16 Taco: Contested Geographies of Food, Ethnicity, and Gentrification." 

To watch a video version of this talk with closed captioning, visit crfs.arizona.edu

Original music provided by Lazaro Gálvez.

S1 E3 - BONUS episode w/ author of "The $16 Dollar Taco"

Decolonized Food Systems: In this episode, Alyshia Gálvez hosts and engages in conversation with Sean Sherman, the Sioux Chef; with Karen Rojas, who is a cofounder of Bronx Bikes, and recently finished her Masters degree in Public Health; and finally we include a discussion about Decolonizing Sustainable Agriculture & Food Systems Education with a group of anthropologists (Teresa Mares, Tony Van Winkle, and Gabriel Valle) at the recent annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association. 

For resources mentioned in the episode, click here: https://tinyurl.com/bdz7ytz9

Original music provided by Lazaro Gálvez

S1 E4 - Decolonized Food Systems

Emily Mendenhall interviews her longtime colleague Edna Bosire about her personal journey in the field of anthropology, beginning at the University of Nairobi's anthropology department. Bosire eventually spent nearly four years at the University of the Witwatersrand where she completed her PhD, working at the intersection of health, nutrition, anthropology, and health systems. Bosire also provides insights into her work as an ethnographer of health policy and systems in Malawi and in her work with Health Systems Global.

S1 E5 - Nourishing Reflections by Kenyan Anthropologist Edna Bosire

In this episode, Lauren Carruth interviews medical anthropologist Emily Mendenhall about how people in her hometown in northwest Iowa responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. In Iowa, few policies directed how people would behave over the course of the pandemic. When the economy ramped up in the tourist town, the community shifted their focus from the virus to the economy. Mendenhall describes how she arrived to spend the summer with her family in the midst of the outbreak and decided to help her brother-in-law (who was leading the public health effort) figure out why people were so dismissive of public health regulations: everyone was unmasking as the summer heat cranked up. She describes why people unmasked and how social relations within the community played out over the course of the pandemic. Many people were very cautious, while some people ignored public health recommendations for personal gain (in business, or social power). This story is a microcosm of one sector of American society whose pandemic experience has differed significantly from communities that have had strict masking and quarantine policies like in Washington, DC, where Mendenhall and Carruth reside. 
twitter: @mendenhall_em

S1 E7 - Interview with Prof Emily Mendenhall about her new book Unmasked

In this episode, Emily Mendenhall interviews medical anthropologist Lauren Carruth about her decades of work in the Somali Region of Ethiopia. First working with United Nations food programs, Carruth describes how she traveled around the country working on medical and humanitarian aid. When she focused on Ethiopia's Somali Region, she was a graduate student in anthropology and spent extended periods working on multi-sited ethnography of humanitarian projects concerning issues of displacement, crisis, nutrition, and infection. It wasn't until later, when she was rethinking her decades of work in the region via dominant humanitarian constructs and local definitions of samafal -- a local term for caring for others -- did the book project take shape. She describes how this project illuminated the complexities through which love and liberation get revealed in the everyday work of local humanitarian laborers. 
twitter: @anthrogirrrl

S1 E6 - Interview with Prof Lauren Carruth about her new book Love and Liberation

In this episode, Jessica Hardin interviews Hiʻilei Julia Hobart about her forthcoming book, Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment (Duke University Press), a book that explores the intertwined histories of cold chains and cold refreshment as they are brought to bear on Native Hawaiian dispossession. Hiʻilei and Jessica discuss research methods, finding projects that call us, and the colonial body politics of pleasure.

S1 E8 - Cold Chains & Care w/ Prof Hi'ilei Hobart (interviewed by Prof Jessica Hardin)

The Nutrire CoLab presents the Duo-Ethnography project. We discuss duoethnography, a feminist fieldwork method for carrying out politically engaged reflexive research on topics that require anonymity. Hosts overview publications about duoethnography in Feminist Anthropology (Valdez et al. 2022) and Field Methods (Hardin et al., forthcoming). Featuring Emily Yates-Doerr, Jessica Hardin, Natalí Valdez, Megan Carney, Abril Saldaña Tejeda, Alyshia Gálvez, Hanna Garth, and Maggie Dickinson. 

Link to Feminist Anthropology article here: http://doi.org/10.1002/fea2.12085 

Nutrire CoLab is produced and distributed in partnership with the Center for Regional Food Studies (University of Arizona) and the American Anthropological Association.

Original music provided by Lazaro Gálvez.

S1 E9 - Duoethnography as Feminist Method

Hanna Garth chats with Natali Valdez about her book “Weighing the Future: Race, Science, and Pregnancy Trials in the Postgenomic Era” published by University of California Press.

Works cited in this episode:

Epigenetics and Methodological Limits, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/epigenetics-and-methodological-limits
Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy by Melinda Cooper (Duke University Press, 2014)
Kyla Wazana Thompkins Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century (New York University Press, 2012)
Sabrina Strings Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia (New York University Press, 2019)
Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment by Patricia Hill Collins (Hyman, 1990)
The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz (Simon and Schuster, 2014)
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff (Public Affairs, 2019)
"Studying Up from the Margins in a ‘white-supremacist-cis-hetero-patriarchal -capitalist culture’" Valdez. Medical Anthropology Quarterly.

And check out these recent pubs by other Nutrire CoLab members:

Carney, M.A. 2022. “Whiteness and Settler Colonial Logics in the Pacific Northwest Craft Beer and Hops Industries.” Food, Culture, and Society. https://doi.org/10.1080/15528014.2022.2069440 

Lauren Carruth and Lahra Smith. “Many Ethiopians see illegal migration as the only escape from violence.” The Washington Post. July 19, 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/19/ethiopian-migration-refugee-saudi-camps/

Lauren Carruth and Lahra Smith. 2022. “Building one’s own House: Power and Escape for Ethiopian Women through International Migration.” Journal of Modern African Studies. 60(1), 85-109. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022278X21000434

Lauren Carruth. “Humanitarian Aid Workers Need Security, Rights, and Better Pay.” The Conversation. April 4, 2022. https://theconversation.com/humanitarian-aid-workers-need-security-rights-and-better-pay-179546

2022    Ruth, Alissa, Katherine Mayfour, Thurka Sangaramoorthy, Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy, Melissa Beresford, Alexandra Brewis, H. Russell Bernard, Meskerem Z. Glegziabher, Jessica Hardin, Krista Harper, Pardis Mahdavi, Jeffrey G. Snodgrass, Cindi SturtzSreetharan, Amber Wutich. “Teaching Ethnographic Methods for Cultural Anthropology: Current Practices and Needed Innovation.” Teaching Anthropology 11(2): 59-72.

2022    Trainer, Sarah, Cindi SturtzSreetharan, Amber Wutich, Alexandra Brewis and Jessica Hardin. “Fat is all my fault: Globalized metathemes of body self-blame.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 36(1): 5-26.

Saldaña-Tejeda, A; Aparicio, A.; González Santos, S.; Arguedas Ramírez, G.; Shaw, M.K.; Manzoni Cavalcanti, J.; Perler, L. (2022) Policy Landscapes on Human Genome Editing: A Perspective from Latin America. Trends in Biotechnology. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tibtech.2022.07.018

Saldaña-Tejeda, Abril, Pérez-Campos, Xyoli and Reddy, Elizabeth. ‘Possible interpretations of seismic noise in Mexico: trust, charisma and the effectiveness of public health risk communication’ (2022) Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society, 5:1, DOI: 10.1080/25729861.2022.2086446

S2 E1 - Weighing the Future: Natali Valdez in conversation with Hanna Garth

In this episode, guest co-hosts Myriam Durocher and Irena Knezevic interview Hi’ilei Hobart and Emily Yates-Doerr on the theme of “food matters”, following their participation as keynote speakers at the international Conference “Food Matters and Materialities: Critical Understandings of Food Cultures”.  

The Food Matters Conference addressed how power relationships take form in contemporary food cultures and materialize in particular food matters/materialities as well as in a wide range of food-related practices (e.g., production, circulation, preparation, consumption). The event theme revolved around “matters”, a play on words that, on the one hand, reflects the will of the co-organizers to address how food matters and materialities emerge in and engage with particular food cultures and, on the other hand, reflects their will to explore food-related issues and their links with food cultures. In her keynote talk, Dr. Hobart shared insights from her fieldwork in an encampment at Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu at the summit of Mauna Kea, detailing practices of resistance led by Indigenous communities, and the role of food and ice in these practices. Dr. Yates-Doerr shared insights and stories emerging from her fieldwork in Guatemala, proposing reflections on how we might want to do and share research in food studies otherwise. In this interview, we highlight some key insights from their respective talks and bring out connections between their work.  

The audio editing of this episode was done by Laura Bruno.

For more info on the Conference: https://carleton.ca/foodmatters/

S2 E2 - Discussing Food Matters with Hi’ilei Hobart & Emily Yates-Doerr

In this episode, anthropologist Jessica Hardin interviews Dora Rossi, aka Samoa’s most glamorous chef and one of its most beloved. A trailblazer in Samoa, Dora’s two Apia restaurants are supplied by local organic farmers under the Farm to Table initiative created by Women in Business Development Samoa and Robert Oliver. In 2016 and 2018, Dora’s family won Best Restaurant in Samoa for their “Paddles” Restaurant at the Samoa Tourism Excellence Awards. A TV pro, Dora appears in Pacific television series REAL PASIFIK and is featured in Robert’s award-winning Samoan cookbook “Mea’ai Samoa: Recipes and Stories from the Heart of Polynesia.”

Me a kai cookbook -https://books.google.com/books/about/Me_a_Kai.html?id=SOUfQwAACAAJ

Mea’ai cookbook -https://books.google.com/books/about/Mea_Ai_Samoa.html?id=gliEngEACAAJ

Pacific Island Food Revolution: https://www.pacificislandfoodrevolution.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/dora__rossi

Instagram: dora_rossi_

Kai pasifika, instagram: @kaipasifika

Nutrire CoLab is produced in partnership with the American Anthropological Association and the UA Center for Regional Food Studies. 

Original music provided by Lazaro Gálvez.

S2 E3 - Jessica Hardin interviews Samoan Chef Dora Rossi

Nutrire CoLab member Lenore Manderson interviews medical anthropologist Nolwazi Mkhwanazi (University of Pretoria, South Africa) on her work around reproduction and kinship, and in building the medical humanities. The two discuss the politics of knowledge production, nurturing and networks, representation and citation, particularly in and of the African continent.

Lenore Manderson is Distinguished Professor of Public Health and Medical Anthropology in the School of Public Health, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Her most recent books include Viral Loads: Anthropologies of Urgency in the time of COVID-19 (with Nancy Burke and Ayo Wahlburg, 2021) and Water’s Edge (with Forrest Gander, 2022). She is editor of the book series Medical Anthropology: Health, Inequality and Social Justice (Rutgers University Press) and from 2023, she is editor of the journal Human Organization. She is the recipient of the 2023 Bronislaw Malinowski Award by the Society for Applied Anthropology.

Nolwazi Mkhwanazi is a medical anthropologist interested in issues relating to gender and the politics of reproduction. She has conducted long-term ethnographic research on early childbearing, kinship and care, and is coeditor, with Lenore Manderson, of Connected Lives: Families, Households, Health, and Care in South Africa. Nolwazi has been involved in initiatives to encourage researchers from the Global South to write for publication, and has conducted writing workshops in Kenya, Nigeria, Spain and South Africa. In her current project, Reimagining Reproduction: making babies, making kin in Africa, Nolwazi is working with scholars in Eswatini, Ghana, Malawi, South Africa and Uganda.

Connect with us on Twitter @Nutrire and Instagram @NutrireCoLab.

Nutrire CoLab is produced in partnership with the American Anthropological Association and the UA Center for Regional Food Studies.

Original music provided by Lazaro Gálvez.


And check out these recent publications from Nutrire CoLab members:

Yates-Doerr, E. 2022  “Bloodwork: Circulatory Disorders, Immunity, and the Scarring of Systems.” Part of the Special Issue, “Working to Live: Immunocapital in Systems of Knowledge Production,” edited by Sareeta Amrute and Mythri Jegathesan. Anthropology of Work Review.

--2022  “War on Hunger, War on Women: Anti-Abortion Politics in Nutrition Science and Policy.” Cultural Anthropology: Hot Spots. Series: “After Roe”

Garth, H. 2022 "Food, Taste, and the Body: Ingestion and Embodiment in Santiago de Cuba." Medical Anthropology Quarterly.

Saldaña-Tejeda A, Aparicio A, González-Santos SP, Arguedas-Ramírez G, Cavalcanti JM, Shaw MK, Perler L. Policy landscapes on human genome editing: a perspective from Latin America. Trends Biotechnol. 2022 Nov;40(11):1275-1278. doi: 10.1016/j.tibtech.2022.07.018. Epub 2022 Aug 24. PMID: 36030109.

Abril Saldaña-Tejeda, Xyoli Pérez-Campos & Elizabeth Reddy (2022) Seismic noise to public health signal: investigating the effects of pandemic guidance in Mexico, Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society, 5:1, DOI: 10.1080/25729861.2022.2086446

Carney, M.A., Chess, D. and M. Rascon-Canales. 2022. "'There Would Be More Black Spaces': Care/giving Cartographies During Covid-19." Medical Anthropology Quarterly https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/maq.12732

Hardin, J. 2022  Winner of the Rudolf Virchow Award, Society for Medical Anthropology, for the paper "Life before Vegetables: Nutrition, Cash and Subjunctive Health in Samoa." Cultural Anthropology 36(3): 428–457.

S2 E4 - Knowledge Production, Reproduction, and Citation Politics w/ Nolwazi Mkhwanazi

Megan Warin interviews Pallavi Laxmikanth about her dissertation research on diabetes and nutritional colonialism in Hyderabad.

Megan Warin is a social anthropologist and professor at the University of Adelaide. Her research focuses on the gendered dynamics of disordered eating, structural disadvantage and obesity, public health interventions, and the politics of gender and racism in the field of developmental origins of health and disease and epigenetics in relation to nutritional (and other) exposures.

Pallavi Laxmikanth is a PhD student in Medical Anthropology and Gender Studies at the University of Adelaide. She studies household practices, foods and food products, businesses and initiatives geared at mitigating or managing metabolic disease in middle-class, urban India. In her PhD, she explores how people with type 2 diabetes outwit biomedical and dietary forms of governance to reverse their illness. Using a phenomenological and STS inspired lens, she examines the colonial origins of biochemical and dietary measurements, and the sensual and affective dimensions of their presence in modern nutritional agendas. She demonstrates how measuring comes to be embodied by people with diabetes, as a means to contend with colonial and capitalist forms of indexing foods and bodies. Her interest in the intersection between food and health, is inspired by her previous work experience in the food industry in India.

Nutrire CoLab is produced in partnership with the American Anthropological Association and the UA Center for Regional Food Studies.

Original music provided by Lazaro Gálvez.

S2 E5 - Policing Pleasure: Colonialism and Reversing Diabetes in Hyderabad

Megan Carney (associate professor of anthropology, University of Arizona) and PhD student Deyanira Ibarra interview Rebecca de Souza and Adam Pine about their work "Hunger, Survivance, and Imaginative Futures: A Racial Analysis of the 'Right to Food'". This conversation followed a recent workshop led by Rebecca and Adam on racialized right to food and storytelling as part of the "Future of Food and Social Justice: A Youth Storytelling Project" at the UA Center for Regional Food Studies.

Rebecca T. de Souza (Ph.D., Purdue University) is an associate professor in the School of Communication at San Diego State University. Her research is concerned with how communication, race, and political-economic systems impact access to food, health, and social wellbeing. Dr. de Souza’s critically acclaimed book Feeding the Other: Whiteness, Privilege, and Neoliberal Stigma in Food Pantries (2019), explores the role of stigma in the lives of food insecure individuals.

Adam Pine is a human geographer (Ph.D. Rutgers) with teaching and research interests in urban policy, race, and the global food system. His principal research projects examine the relationship between white supremacy and US urban planning, the interconnections between housing precarity and food insecurity, and how anti-racist food activists are fighting to institute the right to food in the US.

Nutrire CoLab is produced in partnership with the American Anthropological Association and the UA Center for Regional Food Studies.

Original music provided by Lazaro Gálvez.

S2 E7 - Racializing the Right to Food w/ Rebecca de Souza and Adam Pine

Nutrire CoLab members Megan Warin, Lauren Carruth, Dana Simmons, and Emily Yates-Doerr discuss and respond to the new Obesity Guidelines recently issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Megan Warin is professor of anthropology in the school of Social Sciences at the University of Adelaide. Her research focuses on the gendered dynamics of disordered eating, structural disadvantage and obesity, public health interventions around food, nutrition and alcohol, and public understandings of obesity science. Recent projects explore the value of epigenetics in the contexts of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander science and intergenerational trauma, the reproduction of shame in DOHaD design, and models of social and radical care in Australia and Pacific locations. She and Tanja Zivkovic published Fatness, Obesity, and Disadvantage in the Australian Suburbs: Unpalatable Politics with Palgrave Press in 2019.

Dana Simmons is an associate professor of history at the University of California Riverside. Her research interests include hunger, nutrition, soil and plant science, political economy, the human sciences, feminist theory and technopolitics. Her book, Vital Minimum: Need, Science and Politics in Modern France, traces the history of the concept of the living wage as a measure of physical and social needs (Chicago 2015). She is currently working on a project tracing the science and politics of hunger. 

Lauren Carruth is an associate professor and medical anthropologist in the School of International Service at American University, where she specializes in humanitarian assistance, global health, nutrition, displacement, migration, and the Horn of Africa. Her book Love and Liberation: Humanitarian Work in Ethiopia's Somali Region, was published in 2021 by Cornell University Press. It focused on labor and inequity within the global humanitarian industry, drawing attention to subaltern systems of care and crisis response among local aid workers. She has also published on diabetes and zoonotics diseases among pastoralists, and the irregular migrations of Ethiopians for jobs in Persian Gulf states.

Emily Yates-Doerr is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Amsterdam and Oregon State University. Her research concentrates on health, food justice, and social inequality. Her previous project traced the emergence of obesity in the Guatemalan highlands, resulting in her book The Weight of Obesity: Hunger and Global Health in Postwar Guatemala (2015). She is finishing a book that offers a feminist critique of human capital and vitamin supplements in American (specifically US and Guatemalan) nutrition.

S2 E6 - Nutrire members respond to the American Academy of Pediatrics 2023 Obesity Guidelines

Citational politics and practices: Inspiration from the #CiteBlackWomen movement for teaching and research

Too often, citation is taught in mechanistic ways as a hurdle on the pathway to academic competency. Too rarely, it is framed as a dialogue among and between academics, a love letter, even, to those who have influenced our thinking. This is a problem when statistics show that disparities in citation reflect and reproduce disparities in academic admissions, hiring, funding and inclusion within and between institutions and scholars. In this episode, Nutrire CoLab member Alyshia Gálvez discusses the #CiteBlackWomen movement with its founder, Christen A. Smith, and scholar and founding editor of Feminist Anthropology, Dana Aín Davis; chemist Joshua Schrier; and her graduate students in an interdisciplinary course on citational politics and practices. Inspired by Sara Ahmed’s concept of the “well worn path,” we puzzle over how to avoid reproducing citational practices as a well-worn path leading only to reproduction of inequality and hack the academic algorithms that conspire against us, adequately seeing and acknowledging quality scholarship.

Nutrire CoLab is produced in partnership with the American Anthropological Association and the UA Center for Regional Food Studies.

Original music provided by Lazaro Gálvez.

S2 E8 - Citational Politics and Practices

Abril Saldaña es doctora en sociología por la Universidad de Manchester, en el Reino Unido. Es profesora investigadora del Departamento de Filosofía de la Universidad de Guanajuato en México. Es experta en sociología médica, reproducción humana y social. Su trabajo incluye investigación sobre racismo y comida en el contexto del servicio doméstico; obesidad infantil y gordofobia. Sus últimos proyectos analizan la genómica de la obesidad desde los discursos médicos y científicos y bioética y edición del genoma humano en América Latina.

Tiana Hayden es doctora en antropología por la New York University en Estados Unidos. Es profesora investigadora del Centro de Estudios Demográficos, Urbanos y Ambientales en el Colegio de México. Su investigación se centra en la relación entre la producción y la gestión de espacios y los sistemas alimentarios urbanos, y en la relación entre las movilidades humanas y la alimentación. Realizó investigación en la ciudad de México sobre la regulación del comercio en la vía pública y su relevancia para la alimentación urbana, y sobre las transformaciones en el sistema de abastecimiento de alimentos en contextos de violencia e inseguridad. Sus investigaciones recientes se enfocan en las experiencias y luchas alimentarias de las personas migrantes y refugiadas en México, y en la relación entre trabajo, movilidad y cotidiana de las clases populares de la Ciudad de México. 

Miriam Bertran es doctora en Antropología Social y Cultural por la Universidad de Barcelona. Es profesora investigadora del Departamento de Atención a la Salud de la Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana. Se ha dedicado al estudio de los aspectos socioculturales de la alimentación, en particular en relación con la salud y la sustentabilidad. Su principal interés se centra en el análisis del impacto de la globalización en la gestión de la vida cotidiana y las decisiones alimentarias. Desde este enfoque ha participado en proyectos de investigación sobre alimentación, cultura y salud en diversas partes de México; gastronomía para el turismo en los Valles Centrales de Oaxaca y redes alimentarias alternativas en la ciudad de México. Ha sido asesora en proyectos para la definición de políticas públicas en alimentación y nutrición en México y otros países de América Latina. 

Sandra Aguilar Rodríguez es doctora en Estudios de género por la Universidad de Manchester y maestra en Estudios Latinoamericanos por la Universidad de Oxford en Reino Unido. Es profesora investigadora en el Departamento de Historia de la Universidad Moraviana en Pensilvania, Estados Unidos. Su trabajo explora raza, género y clase social a través de las prácticas culinarias y los discursos y políticas de nutrición entre 1920 y 1960 en México. Ha publicado su trabajo en revistas académicas de Estados Unidos, Inglaterra, Alemania y América Latina, además ha colaborado con capítulos en varios libros editados tanto en español como en inglés.

Alyshia Gálvez es doctora en Antropología Cultural por la Universidad de Nueva York (NYU) y actualmente es profesora de estudios Latinos y Latinoamericanos en Lehman College y de antropología en el programa de doctorado del Graduate Center de la Universidad de la Ciudad de Nueva York (CUNY). Es autora de tres libros acerca de temas relacionados a la migración mexicana a EEUU, incluyendo Comiendo con el TLC: comercio, políticas alimentarias y la destrucción de México (Fondo de Cultura Económica/Itaca, 2022).

Nutrire CoLab is produced in partnership with the American Anthropological Association and the UA Center for Regional Food Studies.

Original music provided by Lazaro Gálvez.

S2 E9 - ¡Panza llena, corazón contento!: estudios sobre el comer y la comida en México

This episode features members of the Wiba Anung team, a partnership between faculty and students at Michigan State University and the Inter-Tribal Council of Michigan. This partnership, that has worked together for fifteen years, supports Tribal early childhood development and broadens the understanding of how culture supports the health and well-being of Anishinaabe children and families of Michigan. The Anishinaabek include the Odawa, Ojibway, and Potawatomi nations who make up the member Tribes of the Inter-Tribal Council of Michigan. 

Recently, the Wiba Anung team has been focusing on how Indigenous food access and food sovereignty are inextricably linked with health and education, and working together on the development of novel, culturally-centered educational materials and activities delivered through Tribal Home Visiting and Head Start programs. This project is called, Nourishing Michigan Indigenous Children with Cultural Health & Equity.

Members of the team share their work together in the co-generation of knowledge that centers Anishinaabe community grounded methodologies, family empowerment through Indigenous food-based practices, and sustainability of Indigenous food systems. They are, from the Inter-Tribal Council of Michigan, Ann Cameron, Head Start Director, Michelle Leask, Program Manager for Maternal and Early Childhood Health, and Beedoskah Stonefish, AmeriCorps VISTA member through the Opioid Prevention and Education Network. Lisa Martin is Senior Research Associate at Johns Hopkins University Center for Indigenous Health; and from Michigan State University: Danielle Gartner, Assistant Professor of Epidemiology, Chelsea Wentworth, Assistant Professor in the Office of Medical Education Research and Development, and Heather Howard, Associate Professor in Anthropology, who facilitates the conversation.

Nutrire CoLab is produced in partnership with the American Anthropological Association and the UA Center for Regional Food Studies.

Original music provided by Lazaro Gálvez.

S2 E10 - Indigenous Food Sovereignty and Our Relational Responsibilities

In this episode, Natali Valdez interviews Megan Warin, a professor and social anthropologist at the University of Adelaide. Megan's research focuses on the gendered dynamics of disordered eating, structural disadvantage and obesity, public health interventions, and the politics of gender, class and race/racism in the fields of developmental origins of health and disease and epigenetics in the context of nutritional (and other) exposures. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and an International Fellow of the Unit for Biocultural Variation and Obesity in the School of Anthropology at the University of Oxford. In collaboration with colleagues in Australia, UK and the US, Megan is currently working on an Australian Research Council project examining creative practices of care between Australian families that experience significant food insecurity and hardship in their communities.

Natali Valdez is a medical anthropologist and science and technology scholar who studies how race, gender, and power are enveloped into scientific knowledge production. Her book, Weighing the Future: Race, Science and Pregnancy Trials in the Postgenomic Era (University of California Press, 2022), is the first ethnography of ongoing pregnancy trials in the United States and United Kingdom.  Her ongoing and future research projects explore reproductive health, systemic racism, and generational trauma. She is a faculty member in the Department of Anthropology at Purdue, and from 2023-2024 she is a Presidential Fellow at Yale University.

Nutrire CoLab is produced in partnership with the American Anthropological Association and the UA Center for Regional Food Studies.

Original music provided by Lazaro Gálvez.

S3 E1 - Unpalatable politics: trifles and tensions in an Australian ethnography of obesity