Sydney Giacalone

As a sociocultural anthropologist, I emphasize interdisciplinary, accessible, and community engaged scholarship in the classroom and my research. My work sits at the intersection of environmental studies, food systems, relatedness, and American rurality. In my courses, I aim to enable students to realize the worth and weight of their ideas. Class materials and activities encourage students to connect broad theorization to grounded histories and personal experiences, consider new perspectives, and critically contextualize academic and public media sources. My own entry to the topic of food systems studies began as a high school student in Charlottesville myself, and I am committed to engaging myself and students in the community beyond the university. My research, publications, and professional affiliations have spanned urban agriculture, food access, GIS mapping, immigration, environmental justice, and unexpected political alliances. My current book project is based on 16 months of ethnography across the US South and Midwest with “ex-conventional” farmers: rural, multigenerational producers who are self-critically claiming culpability for the environmental impacts of their families’ farming and attempting culturally contentious forms of ecological and social repair.