Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern's research while affiliated with Syracuse University and other places
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Publications (25)
This article looks at the United States’ federal H-2A Temporary Agricultural Visa Program and reforms proposed by the Farm Workforce Modernization Act. In this policy analysis, we draw on media content analysis and qualitative interviews to compare the viewpoints of farmers, workers, grower and worker advocacy groups, intermediary agents, and pol...
Drawing on US Department of Labor data and a qualitative case study of New York state horticultural growers, this article explores farmers’ experiences with the H-2A agricultural guestworker visa program. We found that the program is particularly challenging for small to mid-scale (moderate-sized) farmers due to its high costs and deeply bureaucrat...
First paragraphs:
In the spring of 2020, we tragically lost our dear friend and colleague Evan Weissman, a food studies scholar and urban geographer, social justice advocate and activist, and renowned mentor and teacher. Evan was the first faculty member hired to start our intimate Food Studies Program, and an essential part of each of our individ...
In this article we explore the results of a research collaboration between an undergraduate class focused on labor in the food system and the nonprofit organization, Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC) United. Students were trained as interviewers and collected surveys with restaurant workers in the upstate New York region as part of ROC United’s...
As national borders tighten against undocumented migrants, agricultural employers throughout North America have pushed governments for easier access to a legalized temporary farm workforce. Some U.S. farmers and policymakers are seeking to expand the country's temporary agricultural guest worker program (H-2A visa), while Canada's longstanding Seas...
Agriculture in the United States (US), long dominated by white male interests, is rooted in entrenched structural inequalities. Prominent among them is the power of growers over a dependable low-wage racialized and gendered workforce that is disciplined with the threat of their disposability. Workers and other activists have long responded with opp...
This paper looks closely at Latino/an immigrant farming practices, arguing that although many immigrant farmers use practices that are deemed sustainable or ecological by alternative food movement standards, alternative food institutions have not yet recognized immigrant farmers’ increasing contribution to the agroecological knowledge base on U.S....
The difference between the vaccine and the GMO food debates - Volume 32 Issue 5 - Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern, Rick Welsh
In this article we investigate how Latino immigrant farmers in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States navigate United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) programs, which necessitate standardizing farming practices and an acceptance of bureaucracy for participation. We show how Latino immigrant farmers’ agrarian norms and practices are at...
New and exciting forms of food activism are emerging as supporters of sustainable agriculture increasingly recognize the need for a broader, more strategic and more politicized food politics that engages with questions of social, racial and economic justice. This book highlights examples of campaigns to restrict industrial agriculture’s use of pest...
Based on ethnographic fieldwork with farmworkers and farmworker advocates in California and Florida, this chapter explores the progress made by farmworker-led, consumer-supported movements for farmworker justice. It argues for the need to break down divides between producer and consumer, rural and urban, and individual and community based approache...
As White farmers in the United States retire en masse, the racial and ethnic demographics of US farming are shifting to now include a significant number of Latino farm owner-operators. Yet this population of new farmers, contributing specific technical expertise and knowledge, is not represented in current discussions concerning agrarian transition...
This commentary argues for strengthening research and analysis of food workers' rights as part of a more comprehensive sustainable food systems approach. Starting with a broad definition of sustainability, one which includes social, as well as ecological, and economic elements, the author outlines current critiques of alternative food movement acto...
Interest in food movements has been growing dramatically, but until recently there has been limited engagement with the challenges facing workers across the food system. Of the studies that do exist, there is little focus on the processes and relationships that lead to solutions. This article explores ways that community-engaged teaching and resear...
In this article, we highlight findings from ethnographic research on dietary health interventions with low-income Latino im/migrant populations in the Central Coast of California. We discuss the assumptions underpinning different models of nutrition intervention and education, as well as what these assumptions suggest about common perceptions of La...
Following Marx’s theory of social reproduction, I argue that agribusiness benefits from food assistance programs that are available to farmworkers, as they assist workers minimally enough to keep laborers working in the fields, while distracting food assistance providers from the root causes of farmworker food insecurity. These programs simultaneou...
In this essay we put forth nested arguments about the way that racialization remains a powerful force in contemporary society, contending that intersections with space and nature offer important lessons about the (de)construction of race. We argue that the pernicious character traits of racial constructs develop through spatial practices and inters...
This article addresses the need for more engagement between the alternative food movement and the food labor movement in the United States. Drawing on the notion of agrarian imaginary, I argue for the need to break down divides between producer and consumer, rural and urban, and individual and community based approaches to changing the food system....
Farmworkers are often overlooked as producers and consumers of food; although farmworkers in California labour in some of the most productive agricultural regions in the world, they are largely food insecure. This paper investigates approaches to relieving farmworker food insecurity in one of the most productive agricultural regions in North Americ...
This article explores a community garden in the Northern Central Coast of California, founded and cultivated by Triqui and Mixteco peoples native to Oaxaca, Mexico. The practices depicted in this case study contrast with common agroecological discourses, which assume native people’s agricultural techniques are consistently static and place-based. R...
: This article explores the ways that farmworkers, many of whom come from a culture deeply rooted in food and agricultural practices, cope with food insecurity by utilizing their agricultural and nutritional knowledge. Food assistance providers in the USA often treat farmworkers’ inability to afford healthy food as a lack of knowledge about healthy...
Citations
... Some focus on the ability of gardens and other local food systems to help communities create a sense of home in a new country and maintain connection to cultural foodways (Mares and Pena, 2011;Minkoff-Zern, 2012;Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2014;Alkon and Vang, 2016). Others have attended to the more pragmatic benefits of place, emphasizing the opportunities food justice can hold for community-led economic development (Saldivar-Tanaka and Krasny, 2004;White, 2011;Anguelovski, 2014), social network creation (Aptekar, 2015) and social movement building (Weissman, 2011;Loh and Agyeman, 2017). In a study that spans livelihoods and lived experience, Anguelovski (2014: 107) argues that urban farms and gardens in low-income neighborhoods in Barcelona, Boston and Havana 'have transformed neighbourhood conditions and habitat and increased residents' quality of life [so that] environmental justice became intertwined with community development'. ...
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... Specialty crop workers made up 76% of all national H-2A workers in 2019 (Castillo et al., 2021), and most specialty crop farmers using the H-2A Program are moderate-sized operations (Minkoff-Zern et al., 2022; U.S. Department of Labor [US DOL], n.d.). 6 Eighty percent of these farms hire fewer than 50 workers per season, with 63% of farms hiring fewer than 25 workers per season (Minkoff-Zern et al., 2022). This sample of interviews with moderate-sized specialty crop farmers therefore represents the most common type of farmers using the H-2A program. ...
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... Integrating a "civic engagement" component to a social justice course can result in powerful takeaways for students (Ciplet et al., 2013;Barnum and Illara, 2016;Miller, 2018;Stapleton, 2020;Goldberg and Minkoff-Zern 2021), particularly if the coursework includes a dialogue component (Weinzimmer and Bergdahl, 2018). Acting in communities of justice requires multiple forms of recognition, including recognition of the individual, recognition of the group, and recognition of wider interconnected social, political, and economic systems. ...
... In parallel, increasing automation has been a hallmark of the industrialization and digitalization of agriculture, promising to lower the negative health, safety, and economic externalities of labor in agriculture [11,13]. While these trends impact future trajectories for agriculture, the industry remains highly dangerous [14] with workers, farm operators, and their families facing exposure to hazardous chemicals, equipment, and environmental conditions [15][16][17]. ...
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... The exploitation of migrant workers and other farmworkers is often tied to profitdriven agricultural businesses [73]. Many of these businesses focus more on yields than they do on the health, safety, and wellbeing of their workers. ...
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... Current scientific paradigms upon which much of industrial agriculture depends create a divide between those who "know" agriculture and those who "do" agriculture (Coolsaet, 2016). Despite systemic inequities and dis-empowerment, food workers find ways of taking action and asserting control, through mutual aid, collective action, and consumer campaigns (Gottlieb & Joshi, 2010;Minkoff-Zern, 2014;Sbicca, 2017). ...
... Thus, despite strong governmental support for farming through provisions of the U.S. Farm Bill and from U.S. Department of Agriculture agencies such as the Farm Services Agency and the Natural Resources Conservation Service, Latino immigrant farmers, for example, are often left out of various governmental programs; the lack of standards in their farming practice and their racialized identities are attributed to racial exclusion (Minkoff-Zern & Sloat, 2017;Zabawa et al., 2007). The fast growth of farms operated by immigrants re-ignites the debate on racial identity, immigration, and sustainability in a new perspective challenging not only conventional agrarian development theories, but also U.S. agricultural programs and policies (Agyeman & Giacalone, 2020;Horst & Marion, 2019;Imbruce, 2016;Minkoff-Zern, 2018, 2019Minkoff-Zern et al., 2020;Ploeg, 2018;Reynolds, 2002;Seda, 2020). However, there is limited knowledge of the unique experiences of minority immigrants as farmers rather than as farm laborers. ...
... On the resistance side of the relation, scholarship abounds on farmworker movements, but it tends to focus on traditional union organizing, which historically constrains the range of intersecting inequities experienced by farmworkers to economic concerns (Barger and Reza, 1994;Ganz, 2009;Minkoff-Zern, 2017;Wells, 1996). This is understandable when we consider that capitalist agriculture in the US has long benefited from laws that exclude farmworkers as a class from typical labor protections afforded to workers in other occupations. ...
... Immigrant farmers tend to run smaller operations that grow specialty crops and have direct access to markets, and that use alternative farming techniques such as multi-cropping and low agrochemical inputs, differing from U.S. industrial agriculture (Imbruce, 2016;Minkoff-Zern, 2018, 2019. Thus, despite strong governmental support for farming through provisions of the U.S. Farm Bill and from U.S. Department of Agriculture agencies such as the Farm Services Agency and the Natural Resources Conservation Service, Latino immigrant farmers, for example, are often left out of various governmental programs; the lack of standards in their farming practice and their racialized identities are attributed to racial exclusion (Minkoff-Zern & Sloat, 2017;Zabawa et al., 2007). ...
... This food systems approach to labor is apparent in social justice and worker organizations' applied research, such as that of the Food Chain Workers Alliance and Race Forward (Food Chain Workers Alliance, 2012; Liu & Apollon, 2011). Some academic work also follows a food systems analysis of labor (Besky & Brown, 2015;Lo & Jacobson, 2011Minkoff-Zern, 2017;Sbicca, 2015;Wald, 2011). Minkoff-Zern and Mares's vision of scholar-activism resonated with Forum participants for its inclusion of food-based work that takes place both inside and outside the home (i.e., reproductive labor). ...
